#hopperacademy

Life has been crazy, guys! Boy, it's been nuts. What a wild couple of weeks it's been - very little time to stop and take stock. But I thought I'd share a little bit of what's been happening in the past 2 weeks.

StackStore - eCommerce Site

Working with in groups of 3-4, we created our first fully featured fullstack application using the MEAN stack. The project, StackStore, was designed to solidify our knowledge of authentication, session, local storage, and just what it's like to work on a team on a larger project. While it was a pretty grueling few days, we came out the other end with a mock online store. With a little more time, we would also have liked to integrate the Stripe API for payment processing, but we were really focused on a couple of key features - in particular, making the cart persist for both users and guests, as well as implementing powerful front-end filtering of our list of product. The project was difficult, but ultimately really satisfying. The greatest challenge for my group was losing traction over the weekend. We all worked a lot over the weekend, but when the week started and we were all in the same place, it was hard to review and integrate everyone's code in a timely fashion in order to finalize the rest of the app. In retrospect, I see how it would have been useful to make more and smaller branches. We learned a lot about the challenges of working remotely, and also making sure to communicate well as a team. All in all, I think the project was a success - and it was really nice to be working on a project with a team for the first time in the program. I haven't worked with a real team of people since I left A10 Networks about a year ago - and honestly working with a super amazing team is the thing I miss most from that job. (Seriously, shoutout to A10 TechPubs - they're awesome)

Stackathon

Created my first full-fledged independent project: SuperGender.

It was quite a doosy, and required 4 straight days of pretty much non-stop coding. (Also I was coding right up until the presentation.)

So what is SuperGender? Basically, I analyzed data from 100,000+ comic book characters from the Comic Vine API to determine some interesting gender-related trends in comic books. In particular, I was able to analyze the gender breakdown of characters, the average number of issues per character (broken down by gender), the top 10 origins (Human, Alien, Mutant, etc) of each gender, and the top 10 first name/title of character alter egos.

It was a really interesting and surprisingly difficult process. In order to analyze the Comic Vine API in a timely and dependable fashion, I created 2 scripts - one to query the /characters route for all characters and save them to MongoDB, and another to process all of the data and analyze it in order to seed stats objects on MongoDB as well. This meant that I was able to easily serve up all of my statistics without too much latency, and that the user on the front-end can filter statistics by Publisher. Right now, I've implemented filters for the major publishers (Marvel, DC Comics, Disney, Dark Horse Comics & Image Comics) - but in the future, I'm planning to add a search/dropdown to find data from any of the hundreds of publishers in my data.

Other improvements I'm planning include analyzing number of deaths per character by gender, adding filters for creation year of the character (this could highlight some interesting trends), analyzing the genders of friends/foes of characters by gender, and analyzing the gender breakdown of various superhero teams. I'm also curious about ways I might be able to use vision APIs to analyze skin coverage of male v. female characters.

By the way, I really love comics! I've been super excited about the new trend of making comics more inclusive. Between the new Captain Marvel, Thor, Ms. Marvel, and Batgirl, it's a pretty excited time to be a woman or girl who reads comics.

If you'd like to take a look at the code that I wrote to do all of this, feel free to check out the github repo. Would love comments and suggestions if you have any! It actually takes a long time to seed the DB, so I ended up creating the ability to seed in batches.

Tech Talk

I presented my mini tech talk to my fellow GHA classmates today, and had a great time! I talked a little bit about how to get a Phaser game started with a simple walkthrough. You can check out the demo and slides here. It was a bit nerve-wracking preparing to speak in front of everyone - the hackathon project took a lot out of me. But I'm glad I took the time to get familiar with Phaser. I was really happily surprsied at how easy it is to work with, and I'm looking forward to playing around with it and making some fun, nerdy games with it in the future.

Capstone

And now we're in the final phase of the program - capstone. We're still in the planning phases, and haven't 100% settled on an idea. But we have a good one cooking that we're pretty sure we want to go with. More on that as it unfolds... for now, let's just say it combines music and tech. We're still closing in on our exact project, but it's starting to seem like a lot of fun! Looking forward to sharing it in a few weeks when I (gasp) finish up the program? Just 3 more weeks!