Aaronik @ AppAcademy

Three months at AppAcademy

[aaroniik]

[aaroniik]

ToneLotus

Well, I'm finally wrapping up ToneLotus. It's been a long, exciting, and at times painful ride. The bigger it gets, the more deep seeded, random bugs appear. And I'm finding that even professional libraries have bugs - and it's our job to handle those bugs. But I'm proud of what I've made, even if I am exhausted. Check it out. http://tonelot.us.

[aaroniik]

W7D5

Our final day of lecture / project based work. Starting on Monday we will work, individually, on our final projects. I can't wait to get started. I also can't wait to see what amazing inventions my fellow classmates will bring into this world. We finally have the skills, now it's time to put to work our creativity!

[aaroniik]

W7D4

And more backbone. To be honest, backbone is taking a little while longer to pick up than I'd like it to. I'm moving slower than I'd like to be. I think the reason is that Backbone allows so much freedom, you can sometimes make a bad design decision on the outset of the project, and you have to pay for that decision later on. These are the styles and best practices that we're learning now. Backbone ain't no Angular, and it certainly ain't no Rails.

[aaroniik]

W7D3

A full day of backbone. Backbone is like a freedom machine - soooo much freedom, yet sooo much complexity. Almost makes ya nervous. It's like having all this responsibility but not knowing the right way to go about doing it. Fwew, at least nothing else in life is like that.

[aaroniik]

W7D2

What a lecture!! Backbone is new course material for AA, and we approached it in a new fashion. Ned lectured to us until 3 pm (breaking for lunch of course, gosh). The subject was backbone. This weekend was a marathon independent learning sesh of backbone, yesterday was implementing part of it from scratch, and today was what is I believe the longest lecture I've ever had the pleasure to sit through. Immensely helpful in its clarity. Today's course work was a cursory app, but built in backbone. Finally we're learning front end - the last piece of the App Academy puzzle. And with this comes an immense power to create. Just a little while longer of sleeping face down in the proverbial course textbook, and we will have the skills necessary to say we have skillz. Notice the Z, please.

[aaroniik]

W7D1 - Backbone.js

And today we built a portion of the model and view components of Backbone.js. Like it was no big deal. In just 6 weeks my game has been upped to an extent I thought unattainable in such a short period of time. And still I continue to be humbled every day by the people around me.

One thing I know for certain - I can't wait to let loose with these new skills. Some day soon I'm going to be making some really cool stuff.

[aaroniik]

W6D6

Wow. Done with the 6th week. It seems like only yesterday we were all little AA fledglings anxiously awaiting our first assessments. Who would have thunk it'd have flown by with such fierce rapidity.

Today we rocked AJAX with JQuery. JQ makes it easy. A pretty relaxing day, making way for an intense weekend of studying and assessment preparation.

[aaroniik]

W6D4 - games

Snake, Towers of Hanoi and Tic Tac Toe, but all in the browser. All front end. All javascript and Jquery and Jquery-ui. Really amazing. I'm so lucky to be here!

[aaroniik]

W6D3 - Asteroids

We built an asteroids game! Mostly, at least. Using HTML5's canvas and lots of javascript, we made a rudimentary version of the game. Very fun! I'm off to try to finish it up.

[aaroniik]

W6D2 - JS object oriented principles

Built some basic methods with javascript and played around a bit with scoping and closures. Javascript has a lot of quirks but it has a cool way of handling objects and functions and how they interact with each other.

[aaroniik]

W6D1

And so begins our foray into the ever present world of constant closures. Where it's in vogue to invoke. A journey that takes us far from class, into thick, foreboding forest. A cool mist settles on San Francisco, willing us to forget the benevolent creature hoisted just above it. The thickness of the fog bested only by that of its accompanying silence. Words are abandoned and in their absence cold symbology like steel girders glaring deviously at a flower desperately soaking up its 10 minutes of allotted sun. Run rabbit run. Seas of chaos boil, and an island is resting ground for something new. A prototype. A fresh idea squeezed into existence by madness itself. An instance of nothing each object stands on its own, paving a new world with fresh ideas. A world that treads on all but steps on nothing. Waiting for no man, for no woman, a new jungle is born. Unfamiliar to the old, exciting to the new. A world born from Self, a world of Scheme, and lava (java). Welcome to javascript.

[aaroniik]

W5D5

Testing, testing, 1, 2, 3, 4, testing. Integration testing, of course. I dig it. You're going to plan your app anyways, so you might as well combine the testing phase and the planning phase. Then you have a great safety net to fall back on both in terms of the mental responsibility of holding comprehension of the app in your mind at all times, and the responsibility of making sure you haven't broken something in adding new features or making some things a little more efficient. Sign me up. TDD, BDD, it's all good testing to me.

[aaroniik]

W5D4

Today we sat on our chairs and reddit-ed all day long. "Oh, but wait," you say, "I thought this was supposed to be programming class, not sit on your but and reddit all day long class!?!?!?!?" with an awed and irritated look on your face. A soon to be changed look, though, because I retort; "Oh, sorry for the confusion, irked blog reader. I meant we BUILT Reddit all day."

[aaroniik]

W5D3 - Rails lite

We are officially halfway through AppAcademy. Oh that is if AppAcademy is 9 weeks instead of 12... Nobody is really sure. But today we built Rails. We. Built. Rails. That's right, it was awesome. We used WEBrick for the most basic server functionality, then built a controller superclass, a session hash (which is really an instance of a Session class), then a params hash (also instance of class). Then we built a router to intercept requests and send them off in the right direction. This was full of meta programming and deep philosophy and things of the like. Now I find myself weary yet again, and with much work to do. Goodbye from this blog post, my sister will see you tomorrow if my author doesn't forget.

[aaroniik]

W5d2

So, after all this rails, how well do you know rails? We were asked that very same question. In the form of a test. Passed with flying colors, with a whopping 5 minutes to spare! The test today was 2 1/2 hours, compared to our other tests which topped out at 1:15, then :45 and :25. This was a doozy. The rest of the day was spent figuring out actionmailer. ActionMailer is fun because we can set up websites whose job it is to spam people. Or you know something like that.

[aaroniik]

W5D1

Rails rails rails rails. So many rails. I can make a sign in, sign out, sign up situation in an app in like 2 hours now. Hashes and hashes and hashes! Tomorrow is the assessment for this sign in/out/up functionality and I'm excited, because whew it's getting to somewhat frequent if you know what I'm sayin. But all in all it's good, I'm getting the hang of it and that's what I came here to do.