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Unfortunately today, rather than explore the depths of JQuery by making my own JQuery light, the effects of not enough sleep and exercise caught up with me and I opted to take a few strikes and stay home.  on the plus side, once I had slept a few more hours, made some real food, and gone for a quick jog on the beach, I felt much better, and still had extra time to prepare for tomorrow morning’s assessment, as well as to catch up on some readings and videos.  Off to bed, so the restless cycle doesn’t begin again!

Today was all about the magic of JQuery!  I mentioned the homework project in my post last night (wacky painter, a grid of squares that change color when your cursor goes over them), and the in class work was similar: we designed a user interface/API for tic tac toe and towers of hanoi to be played in a browser window on a computer, tablet or smartphone, as the only interaction necessary was being able to click on box elements, no key entry required, and get the page to react (changing the color of squares, making elements appear or disappear, putting X’s and O’s into our board...).  this was a fun way to see a bit of what happens in front end development, as these were both games we had built previously and today was about getting the game logic to communicate with the browser window effectively.  our bonus project was the game snake, but it’s also the bonus tomorrow, after we build OUR OWN VERSION OF JQUERY!!  haha this one seems like it might be a little more manageable than when we built our own rails or ActiveRecord, as jquery has a pretty straightforward API... or maybe it just makes more sense to me than rails or activerecord do.  anyway, looking forward to getting under the hood, as jquery seems like a pretty useful and versatile tool.

Tonight, in lieu of a hefty lecture tomorrow, we played around with JQuery, a really useful subset of javascript that allows you to do some interesting meta-programming, including injecting html and css tags into your existing webpages, and handling and waiting for user input, so that buttons on the page can re-style the page itself! a fun, dynamic project, but maybe too much fun as kept me up late messing around with it long after I was officially done with the exercise.  Hopefully, that means my mastery (or at least my ability to recall enough to google it) will be that much stronger!

today we built the classic arcade game Asteroids, using javascript and a useful pixel drawing tool called canvas.  While my partner and I didn’t quite have a fully functional game, we did have red circles flying around the screen at random vectors, wrapping around to the other side if they flew out of the window, crashing into our blue ship, resetting the ship and destroying the “asteroids” upon collision!  this quite a rewarding and fun day, particularly ironing out the bugs and having something that actually rendered onto our screen, especially given that all our logic was built in JS, which we only started learning last Thursday.  Tomorrow we shift gears and work in css and html to effectively style static webpages with content (rather than constantly refreshing video games), but I’m already starting to see how well all these tools will function together.

On Friday we learned various javascript practices for making information available outside of particular objects or scopes. Binding, or keeping a function attached to the definition of what sort of object it is (maintaining the value of the keyword "this" for that object when leaving its native scope) when passing a function as a callback to another function (callback here means a function passed as an argument to another function to be called upon later). We talked about how, unlike ruby, Javascript doesn't care how many arguments are passed to a function, even if it only needs 1 argument to work properly it will gladly take 6, or 50, or however many you please, including nested functions or any other type of object. these can be accessed using the special variable "arguments" and this is obviously really handy for passing callbacks around to various functions! we also talked about hoisting, where the declaration of variables is hoisted up to the top of the parent scope chain to make them more widely available, and namespaces, or how to refer to what scope we are currently in. While we had the chance on Friday to start implementing some simple console games (such as towers of hanoi and tic-tac-toe) today we will be building the classic arcade game Asteroids!

today was our first day using javascript! It is a bizarre language to be sure (cobbled together patchwork by good old Netscape Navigator's developers back in the 90s) but can definitely do some cool things. After a lecture on topics like functions (JS's version of methods), closures, initializing variables, scope... we actually covered quite a lot of material, our longest lecture in a while, which was nice, I've been missing the lectures as we've mostly been having less structured Q&A sessions and video lectures lately. After lecture, our pairing work was to go back over a lot of our ruby assignments from the first week and do them again, but this time in JS. was fun to practice defining functions on the prototype of an object, essentially giving all objects that are built from that object the same properties without having to define those properties on each child object. Also enjoyed nesting functions within other functions, and sometimes making them anonymous (not actually assigning them to variables, but just calling them in scope!) and it was fun thinking through the recursion exercises all over again, as it had been 4 weeks since our last time down the rabbit hole. }; (no thats not a strange emoticon, its me ending the function i began in the post title, and then invoking it, in JS!)

after 5 weeks of drinking from the firehose, today was a welcome break.  day started a little earlier with the retake assessment, then we had some free bagels, a few Q&A sessions, and basically had the day to tie up loose ends and learn anything about rails that we hadn’t yet t had the chance to cover or go into depth on.  Tomorrow we plunge into javascript, which I’m quite excited about: not only is it a new language, which is always fun, but its one that has some delightful quirks, and of course is so useful in the professional world as nearly every current website uses it for rendering.  plus, i get to crack open a brand new textbook! 

With that, rather than diving into the intricacies of handling HTTP requests and responses, I’m hittin’ the books!

Today we worked with the rspec related gem Capybara, a way to write out tests for page views in a rails server.  This allowed us to do some Test Driven Development of an app where users could track goals or to-do items, with a social component where other users could make comments on their goals.  My partner and I decided to call these ambitions, though our project wasn’t too ambitious in scope, as we were more focused on trying to think backwards and write tests first for code we hadn’t yet written.  Ultimately though I think everyone in the cohort was preoccupied with tomorrow’s assessment, where we will be required to build out a full rails app in 2 hours and pass over 50 tests, making it by far the largest and longest assessment we have taken yet, in terms of content, files created, memorization required, and of course allotted time.  I’m still at a/A running through the practice test, but soon I’ll head home for a few short hours of sleep, and then more practice!

another rails project, this one designed as a clone of the popular forum website reddit, with authenticated user logins, and successive pages that belong to each other (sub-ReadIts, as my partner and I decided to call our clones, which have posts, comments, etc), again with a focus on building page views, models and controllers.  Rails is starting to get more comfortable and I’m having to refer to guides less... just in time to layer in some CSS tomorrow, and then get tested on rails on Tuesday.  Better get some sleep, because here we go.

Thursday of Wk4 was devoted to a solo project; implementing all of the rails, SQL and embedded ruby we have learned to build a website that can keep track of users (and authenticate and encrypt their passwords and sessions), and allow them to store or update information on their favorite (or least favorite, or neutral) bands (really this should be called Artists but we were told to call them bands) albums and tracks on those albums, building out the associations and relationships between these data classes in our models, rendering html pages for each (i had some fun picking out background pictures for some of these pages and using a few basic html tags I know from outside the course).   Though I didn't struggle or find myself stumped as often as I did on our last solo day, I did find it harder to maintain focus and a good pace when working on my own (probably spent more time than I needed to messing with rendering pretty pages and searching the internet for pictures of my favorite bands, and not enough time building out the architecture, which was really the point of the exercise).  Having a partner prevents me from indulging my more impulsive and distractible side, as I am focused on the pair of us getting through the material, instead of "going at my own pace".  Seems like I'll either need to improve on my ability to get through some of this rails architecture stuff more quickly (which I'm sure I will with practice), or else I'm gonna need to set aside a LOT of time once I start working on my final project. Today (or rather, W4D5) we will be building a clone of the popular site reddit.  I have never been much of a redditor, but as I understand it, its basically a grouping of forums, where users have the ability to up or down vote posts by other users, whether those are links to pages, images, or just comments.  Perhaps at the end of the day I'll know more.

on the plus side, I’m getting a lot better at diagnosing errors in rails, so perhaps my struggles today were advantageous!  another example of how putting in as much work as possible now, even when things don’t come easily, will help optimize my required time investments in the future.

Building on our experience yesterday building a rails server, today we populated a server with fully functional and viewable web pages, utilizing both html code and embedded bits of ruby, known as erb (embedded ruby).  Our task today was to build a cat rental website.  Hard to imagine a situation where someone would need to rent a cat, but entertaining as a concept, which can sometimes make implementation a bit more fun.  Rails is starting to gel a bit as we continue each day to build on what we learned the previous day, though I still feel like a lot of our projects are ambitious in scope given the amount of time we have to work on them.  Still, felt good to flex my html muscles again, a language I haven’t used extensively in over a decade, and interpolating ruby code directly into html is way more satisfying than I expected it to be (certainly more so than when I was blindly following our first rails tutorial, doing whatever it told me to do but having little understanding of what any of it meant).  Tomorrow we will add more functionality to our cat rental site, so I’ll have more to say on the subject then!  based on the readings and video lectures, it seems we will be adding authentication and encryption to the site, to ensure that users can’t steal each others’ cats.   

After our assessment on SQL and ActiveRecord relations (in which we built out relationships in a data table of US Senators, committees they sit on, parties and ideologies they belong to and bills they are considering... despite just being a word problem example, the political nature of this one was fun for me), we began our deepest excursion yet into the world of rails, building and launching locally hosted rails servers to respond to HTTP requests. In layman’s terms, we built the skeleton of a website, which can respond to various urls input in a web browser with logic to render pages, store data types and relationships like user profiles and contacts, or to modify or delete those records.  Working with a partner again was a relief.  Coding collaboratively is one of the easier things I’ve ever had to collaborate on, especially when on a similar knowledge or experience level with a partner.  If neither of you knows how to do something, you suggest things and try them until something works.  If one of you knows, its a small matter of explaining it clearly to the other.  If there’s ever a difference of opinion on how to proceed, just try one way and see if it works!  If only everything in our society worked this way...

I imagine this is good practice for the professional world, as I will often have to code alone, and I need not hesitate to ask others to give my work a fresh set of eyes or help me get unstuck (and indeed to foster relationships in which such interactions are reciprocal)... but I’m looking forward to having a partner again tomorrow.

Today we continued our work with the ActiveRecord gem, creating a rails project from scratch, building out interactive databases and designing queries.  The main project today was to design an app and a database that could handle the creation and responses to user polls, imposing constraints to prevent users taking the polls from giving more than one answer to the same questions, or answering their own polls.  My partner today had a significant amount of experience using rails and SQL, which made today's dynamic very different than most other days.  Usually it feels like my partner and I are lost in the woods together, consulting our map (the day's assignment instructions) to navigate our way out.  In this case, Matt usually had a pretty solid idea of how to proceed, and I found myself having to dig in and basically ask him to explain things to me regularly.  While this was a bit humbling, it was also an excellent learning opportunity as Matt proved to be quite good at explaining these concepts, almost like I had a private tutor.  We managed to get all the way through the assignment with ten minutes to spare (even though the day was two hours shorter than normal to accommodate for the graduation ceremony of the January cohort), giving us a chance to upload the project to github and then chat with neighboring pairs, providing a small amount of last minute help and guidance and comparing implementations.  While I wish we'd had the opportunity to do an in-class practice assessment, it was nice to be able to leave at 4, do some grocery shopping and laundry, prepare and eat dinner before 8 pm... and get slightly more rest so I could go into Friday without such a dramatic sleep deficit!

with that, I’m off to get some rest.  You reap what you sow.