Head to Code

To quote the Grateful Dead: "What a long strange trip it's been."

Tomorrow I'll add more bells and whistles, like allowing users to upload a CSV and other features.

So far, I finished the univariate statistics, two sample t-test, one way ANOVA and linear regression.  I think I'll just add multiple linear regression and call it a day.  Maybe, I'll add in the Chi-Square test as well.  We'll see how far I get tomorrow.

Today, I started work on my second project: Introducing Gauss Statistics Laboratory.  It's a data analysis and visualization web app.  I'm going to just start on basic statistical techniques: two sample t-test, ANOVA, linear regression, etc.  There's a computation component and a visual component for each procedure.  I'm pretty excited about it.  I can't wait until it's done so I can show it to my math friends.

Anyways, I was able to use bootstrap and touch up the layout of my forums project.  I like the way it looks now.  It's simple.  There's not anything on the page that isn't doing anything.  I'll try to deploy it on Heroku tomorrow and once I got that done, I'll continue to add more features.  The forum is functional but is really bare bones.  My goal now is to make it full-featured.

Today, I started working on the layout and styling of my project.  I'm figuring out how to incorporate Backbone and my own CSS files.  So far, I'm really only using Backbone's 12 column span divs, which are a nice way to place divs side by side.  I watched some Backbone tutorials and while it is very powerful for certain applications (ie. make a web store), it's hard to figure out how those designs fits into my project.  I'm debating whether or not to read up some more on Backbone or just play around with it by myself.

Today, we continued working on our final projects. I continued working o my forums.  I got the got most of the backend done and started working on the layout.  So far, all the main functionality is there but everything looks really bad.  I'm going to have to learn some CSS and maybe some Backbone to make everything look nice.  So far, it's just plain text and links on white html.

Today we worked on our final projects in class.  I always find myself debating whether or not to use foreign packages or built things in house. For example, I'm using devise (a user authentication gem) but when I was stymied by bugs, I sometimes wish I made the authentication myself.  When you use foreign code, you have to rely on StackExchange and documentation.  Fortunately, I resolved my devise bug but still it makes me wary of foreign gems.

Okay.  This tumblr post will be my last distraction.  It's hacking time!

My partner for the last two days was Dylan, who comes from a physics background.  We talked chatted a bit about our academic research (I did some in math).  His research in delayed time differential equations seemed really interesting.

I'm happy to say I'm getting much better at learning through a combination of documentation, stackoverflow and other online sources.  We didn't get too far in the project but I felt I learned the material pretty well.  As always, my backbone knowledge grew leaps and bounds but there's still a lot to learn.

Today, we used backbone to build an RSS Feed where we can subscribe to various RSS feeds.  My understanding of Backbone grew leaps and bounds.  The pieces are fitting together.  I think after one more day, I would be a backbone expert.  You can hold me accountable to that.

On that note, it was a tough day, which is understandable: We're building a backbone app (albeit a very simple one) in just one day.  I know in another day or so, backbone would become second-nature.  But the beginner's stage is always frustrating.

Today, we used ajax to build a dream journal.  The A in ajax stands for asynchronous, so ajax commands run in parallel with the code beneath it.  As such, we had to use callbacks to run functions after ajax commands had been run to make sure they won't result in errors.  So we also used callbacks: both listeners and regular callbacks.  I learned a lot but it was challenging.

Today, we used JS to build snake and asteroids.  We set up the classes and models first.  Then we rendered the game on an html canvas element.  I also learned asynchronous JS where we used the setInterval command and placed the whole game in a loop, which runs a function every set time interval.  I'm really proud of our snake and asteroids.    

Anyways, It's pretty exciting now. We have the basic tools to build visually stunning, interactive games outside the command line.  The possibilities are endless...

Beware the scope in JS.  We had a bug in our make_change program caused by forgetting to put "var" before our variables.  As a result, subsequent recursive calls of the function used variable value from the outer scope.  Sneaky...