#solo programming

Topics

Putting it all together!

Following a project timeline & meeting deadlines

Reading outside technical documents

Learning about new packages, modules, and etc. on your own and incorporating them into your project

Google Maps API

Final Project - I'm building Facebook!!! <3

React & Rails

Projects

BenchBnB - inspired by AirBnB

Locations for the best benches

Solo day

Learnings

require('flux').Dispatcher - make sure to capitalize "Dispatcher"

database.yml - if you accidentally create Rails app using sqlite3, to change it to using postgresql, make the following changes

database: benchbnb_dev - add to both default & development in database.yml

adapter: postgresql

Gemfile: gem 'pg' (remove gem 'sqlite3'

"Uninitialized Constant 'API'" - means you need to nest controllers/benches_controller.rb under "api" as controllers/api/benches_controller.rb

Topics

CSS - Cascading Style Sheets

Float

Inline Blocks

Flexbox

css-tricks.com/lodge

Assessment 5 - Practice

Javascript

Jasmine Specs

Image Types

PNG - transparent background, good for logos

JPG - cannot have transparent background, good for photographs, bad for icons because of artifacting

Vendor Pre-fixing

Projects

App Academy Friends

Replicate a social media page using CSS

No Partner

Learnings

The following is a common/classic/traditional way to center elements

margin: 0 auto;

The following is another standard width setting, originated by the New York Times way back in the day

width: 900px;

Make text not wrap, but stretch all the way across the container

white-space: nowrap;

Text Shadow - horizontal_shadow, vertical_shadow, color

text-shadow: 2px 2px #ff000

Hide overflowing content, clipped, rest of the content remains visible

overflow: hidden;

It's much easier to get bogged down in your own errors/bugs when coding by yourself

Use Chrome Dev Tools rather than switching between own code & browser

Check filepaths when importing images

If you want an image to be searchable & included in SEO, include it in the content of the HTML and not just as a background image

Topics

Rails / Web Application Framework

Active Record

Flash

Exceptions

Rendering text via a file & filepath

Rendering an image via a filepath

Rack::Request & Rack::Response

response.backtrace

Projects

Rails Lite

Flash error handling

Exception handling

Static image handling

CSRF - authentication handling

Finished ActiveRecordLite

Solo Day

Learnings

dir_path = File::dirname(__FILE__) - handy way to pull the current directory path

Mime Types

MIME_TYPES = { '.txt' => 'text/plain', '.jpg' => 'image/jpeg', '.zip' => 'application/zip', '.png' => 'image/png' }

Friday we had our first day coding solo, as opposed to the paired programming exercises in which we usually engage.  Our lecture covered meta-programming (writing code which, when executed, writes new methods, essentially code encoding code).  We then used meta-programming to encode our own version of the gem we’ve been using to call SQL commands in rails this week, ActiveRecord.  The purpose of this would seem to be twofold: we have the opportunity to practice meta-programming, and we gain a much deeper understanding of the functionality of ActiveRecord by having to write the thing ourselves.  While at first I was thrilled to plug one of the school monitors into my laptop, put my headphones in, and go at my own pace, it wasn’t long before I began to miss the benefit of a second pair of eyes and cerebral hemispheres to spot mistakes and find new approaches to problems.  Having practiced so much, and overcome so many challenges, as a member of a pair, coding alone again was mildly like a lobotomy.  Cut off from my other hemisphere, I approached problems in a more brute-force manner, and started to get a little frustrated with the fact that the TA’s had to field (at least) twice as many questions as usual and were therefore (at most) half as available, until it occurred to me to swallow my pride and just ask those working solo around me for guidance to get over a few humps.  

Today was our first solo programming day, and I loved it. It was such a relief to have uninterrupted thought. Pair programming has definite advantages, but so does solo work; I'd prefer it if our class split its time 50/50 between the two.

I made checkers today (all by myself!). It's functionally complete, and I'm stunned by that outcome because it's a first for one of the big projects. And about a third of the people I talked to didn't finish theirs. Maybe I won't get kicked out of App Academy after all.

Notable Exercise: Checkers

Today, was a solo day (no pair-programming).  It was different.  I wonder if this is going to be a regular occurrence.  I liked being able to listen to music while programming.  I think I listened to the whole Radiohead discography today.

The exercise today was checkers.  I finished early.  I basically just took the chess architecture and adapted it to checkers.  See, now that I've done chess, I feel comfortable at programming any type of chess-like game. Hmm... speaking of which, what other chess-like games are there? Uhh... there's checkers, Chinese chess and Chinese checkers.  lol.  Funny, how there's a Chinese counterpart to both chess and checkers.