nicole @ app academy

Capstone status: I am 80% satisfied.  I’m writing this on Sunday night, so I still have tomorrow for finishing touches, but as of now there are a couple things that aren’t working as I’d like them to and it’s unclear whether I’ll have them fixed up by Tuesday.  On Friday and over the weekend, I added a few little things that were missing, made some big changes to the layout on some key pages, and generally went to town on my to do list.

Also on Friday, we were presented with our red a/A shirts as we said goodbye to the main curriculum.  Hello, job search curriculum!! 

I believe this is the last Tumblr post I’ll be required to write, but I plan to continue jotting down my thoughts here during the final phase of App Academy and beyond.

I got the random teleportation functioning, which ups the fun factor by quite a bit (and makes the app easier to demo).  It also keeps track of all the places you’ve been teleported to, so you can go back and forward in your history.

Other than that, it wasn’t a blazingly productive day.  I began work on a thumbnail strip carousel for the Map View page; finishing it up will likely dominate a lot of tomorrow, and my heart isn’t really in it, but I need some way of limiting the world map view results and a thumbnail strip makes sense.

The only really necessary things left to do at this point in my project are the things I’ve been putting off because they're dull, but necessary. 

We reviewed each others' apps, and I got some helpful feedback about how to make mine easier to use. It wasn't until I watched people click around aimlessly on my site that I realized how mysterious it is (and not a good kind of mystery).

I'm appreciating more and more the importance of a testing suite. We didn't have time to write them for these projects, but I sure could have used one. Yesterday was one of those days where I'd add or fix one feature, deploy to heroku, and then immediately realize something else was very broken. A few tests for the most important functionality would have saved me a lot of headaches, and saved me from having to manually click through everything to find out what I messed up. 

The last major feature I'm going to add (actually a pretty small thing that will just make it more fun) is the random teleportation. After that, it's all bug fixes, refactoring, and coming up with ways to make it more intuitive to use. 

- added tokenizing for tag input

- finished up Album implementation (still need delete features...); albums now display on user pages, and adding photos to albums / adding new albums is a little easier (though still not an ideal workflow for the user)

- refactored a bunch of scattered sub-views to use one template that I can modify as needed

- little nudges to the layouts, UI improvements, and such

No huge strides today, but I’m more or less on track for my MVP.  I added a “minimum viable map”: a map view that simply shows markers for all the panos, with a thumbnail pop-up.  It’s kind of just a placeholder for now… if time permits, I’d like to add a fancier carousel view on this page. I also made progress on Albums. Users can create a new album and then individually add their own panos to the album from the pano view page.  I’ll need to come up with a nicer and more intuitive interface for doing this, and still need to integrate albums more fully into the user pages, etc. 

I continue to be dissatisfied with the level of repetition in my code, so I’ve decided to spend time tomorrow refactoring some stuff out into reusable components.  This project has taught me many valuable lessons about modular component design and staying DRY.  

My list of bonuses/stretch goals also keeps growing.  Something that I would love to add is an option to be teleported randomly around the world (like Mapcrunch) — but coming up with random locations with Street View within striking distance is tricky. I have a couple of ideas in mind, but a truly comprehensive approach would probably be beyond the time limits of this project.

Last Tuesday my app began its life as a Flickr clone.  On Friday morning, I decided to go in a slightly different direction: while still “inspired by” Flickr in terms of layout and features, Streetlamp will be a place to explore Google Street View and share interesting, beautiful, and otherwise notable street views.  Sort of like a cross between Flickr and Mapcrunch. I spent Friday making that possible and revamping my existing code (including changing “photo” to “pano” everywhere). 

Made decent progress on Streetlamp today, getting the essential functionality for tags and comments up and running.  I wish I could have done more, but I hit a few buggy roadblocks in addition to facing some design decisions that I hadn’t finalized in my proposal.  Since my app isn’t too conceptually interesting on its own, I’m very eager to finish the MVP so I can move on to my bonuses, and generally making it as full-featured as possible in the time allotted. 

At this point, three days in, these capstones are far and away the most complex applications we’ve created.  This means, for me, that I occasionally get lost in my own code.  I spent a whole lot of time throwing debugger statements around today. I’m definitely incurring some technical debt, and will work on paying it off over the weekend so that things don’t get too crazy. I hope to focus more on keeping things clean and developer-friendly.  It’s hard to do so when we’re working at such a fast pace, but it’s incredibly important.   

After class I stayed for the weekly algorithms lecture on string compression and Huffman encoding — super interesting, even though I was feeling pretty burnt out.  I’m looking forward to algorithms being in focus once we’re done with our projects.  

Capstone report: Finished the Flux setup and basic views for Users (index and show).  Cleaned up some bugs and made some overall improvements to views and functionality (redirecting to the new photo page turned out to be simple).  Set up my domain — http://streetlamp.io — so I guess I’m sticking with the somewhat inscrutable name Streetlamp.  And I added the ability to upload your current location along with the photo, plus a Google Map with marker on the photo show page.  Oh, and I spent some time fumbling with Bootstrap (and learning how to actually use it in the process), which I consider time well-spent since it will prevent me from mangling my CSS beyond repair (it’s already pretty mangled). I’m realizing that Bootstrap with React requires a fair amount of planning and organization due to all the nesting of React components. 

Prioritizing features continues to be challenging, but I think I have a good picture of how to proceed.  Tonight I’m going to focus on generating some more seed data, and also draft a more detailed timeline to guide me through the remainder project. 

Can’t believe how amazing everyone’s projects are looking already.  My classmates are creating apps that I’m genuinely looking forward to using! 

Capstone report: I finished up auth, the photos index view, the basic “show” pages for individual photos, and was able to get photo uploading through Cloudinary to work.  I’m a little stumped as to how to redirect users to the photo show page after upload; hopefully I can figure that out early on tomorrow. Also, every time I feel like I’m getting the hang of the Flux pattern, I run into an issue that prompts me to think otherwise!  But I know that the more nuances we struggle with, the closer we get to mastery. 

As I worked through the initial tasks on my capstone today, I realized how important it will be to stay organized and on-task throughout this process.  While I was able to complete much of my initial phases, I also ran into some complications that ended up taking more time than I would have liked.  So I plan to micro-manage myself a little more and start using a tracking system for my todos. 

  Last but not least, I’ll be keeping a running tally in my blog posts of how many trips I’ve made to Chai Bar by David Rio (“CBBDR”) over the course of the capstone curriculum. 

On Friday we started our last non-capstone project, a clone of AirBnB.  More React, more Flux, fewer problems.  The Google Maps API is pretty fantastic. Though I’m antsy to get going on my capstone (a Flickr clone themed around sharing photos of street art and other public installations), I’m glad to have Monday as one last hurrah building an app with some written guidance about how to approach it. 

Exhausted. Today was pretty great, and eventful: 

- It was our last day of pair programming. Tomorrow we start our solo React project, and after Monday we’ll be in capstone land.  As much as I dig solo work, I’ll miss the daily experience of working through a tough project with someone. 

 - We said goodbye to more of Rails as we knew it today.  We’re now using the React router to manage our paths. Sean & I built a Pokédex.. or rather, we hooked up a bunch of React and Flux infrastructure to an existing backend full of cute pokémon. The Flux pattern is making more and more sense to me.  However, I’m not sure I made much headway in understanding how React routes work other than at the most basic level, so that’s one of my foremost goals on the solo project tomorrow. 

We built a player piano* using React, this time using the full Flux architecture/philosophy/way of life.  Flux embraces a uni-directional data loop and a snazzy, omnipresent flow chart. While fairly easy to conceptualize, in practice it is a significant departure from that Rails MVC workflow we know and love, so today was challenging.  There was a lot of “wait, what does this thing do again?” — but it definitely started coming together.  

We incorporated React and Rails: a huge stride from yesterday, when we were doing everything client-side without any database or backend action to speak of. Vic & I wrote a simple “to do” app. The MVC flow was quite different from anything we previously did in Rails.  All changes to the todo list are governed by the TodoStore, which 1) makes ajax requests to the API::Todos rails controller, 2) keeps track of all the React components that need to be updated when any changes are made, and 3) fires off those callbacks whenever something changes, updating everything synchronously and super fast.  With this structure, we’re part of the way towards implementing the Flux architecture, which we’ll take on tomorrow.

Our forms used controlled components, in which all input values are part of the component’s state and the inputs always match the state. We assign the value of the input to the component’s state, and onChange we trigger a method that updates the state.  I believe these actions will be moved out of the component itself once we start on Flux.

We made our first AJAX requests on Friday, implementing a dynamic search bar and “follow” button for a Twitter clone.  While it took us a little while to figure out how we should approach writing these plugins and incorporating AJAX, it was pretty rewarding to see the search results seamlessly populating on the page.  I still need time to feel confident about using AJAX, but it will happen.   

Friday was also our fifth and penultimate assessment, on JavaScript. Our cohort crushed it. hooooooly hell, will I be happy once we’re done with assessments for good.