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Week 9 - Thursday

So exciting to see everyones project tomorrow. Although there are still many features I could think of adding (and I probably will in the future) it is ready to be shown tomorrow. I will use the morning to finish a list of outstanding styling issues and adding more fake data.

Week 9 - Wednesday

This morning I implemented the file picker. Overall it is working but it doesn't have too many nice functionalities like seeing a preview of the image or allowing to crop. I will try to look into this a bit more tomorrow but my main focus will be to finish styling, add content and create seed data. Most likely I will continue working on this after Friday anyway.

Week 9 - Tuesday

Only 2,5 days left! Time is flying by and there is still so much to do. Today was OK progress, I got stuck for a while but in the end fixed all the routing and data loading issues I had before. Additionally I cleaned up a lot of small things, like the functionalities of forms, ordering of data and some css fun. I think I have a nice base for the home page, but I still need to create the actual content and decide on images. One major think for tomorrow is to change the image reader to more the images to filepicker.io rather than saving them as big strings into the database. Hopefully the implementation will go pretty fast. I will also need to decide if I will still add the shopping page or leave it as a WIP page for now. I hope to keep Thursday reserved for creating nice seed data, styling, cleaning up and adding some small things.

Week 9 - Monday

Today I finished a couple outstanding things such as working forms for submitting a design and pre-ordering. I learned more on how to upload images and save them into the database. With only 3 more days left before we will present it I need to focus on the key features that are still required as well as leave half a day for proper styling. It is easy to get caught up in all the cool possibilities. :)

Tomorrow I hope to resolve some of the data loading issues and create the home page.

Week 8 - Wednesday & Thanksgiving Break

The past couple of days I have spend building out the challenges feature of my App. This basically starts with an overview of all the outstanding challenges. Once a visitor clicks on a challenge they will be directed to the challenge show page where they will find more information and all the designs that have been submitted so far. On this page they can also submit their own design for the challenge. Clicking on one of the designs will bring you to a detailed overview of the design including some basic stats, overview of people who pre-ordered and all the comments. Most of the functionalities are they, but they will still need a bit of polishing.

Tomorrow I hope to finish the majority of what is left for this tomorrow and then move on to the home page.

Week 8 - Tuesday

This morning we had the last assessment, which covered Backbone. It went very well and the practice for the assessment will come in handy during the final project.

After the assessment we started our own project. It felt somewhat strange to start with a completely clean slate. My app will be a platform for designers and fashion lovers that will crowdsource designs and sell them on the website. Today I worked on the foundation, getting a user login with auth, a basic navbar. Afterwards I started implemented the first feature, which is the challenges index and show page. It is progression well although I have to seriously start making some decisions regarding the layout. Hopefully after tomorrow I will have this part up and running.

Week 8 - Monday

Last day before the final project starts. We continued working on Trello. It was a good experience but it turned out that saving the sorted order from the drag and drop is a bit more challenging to implement than the drag and drop itself (JQuery Sortable). Overall it was a good prep for the final project. I was also very happy to hear that my ideas for the final project were approved. More on that subject soon.

Week 7 - Friday + weekend

On Friday we started Trello, which is a solo project. Trello is a to do app and a perfect way for us to practice everything we have learned so far. It started out quite smooth until I got to the point of nested lists and cards and subviews. Luckily I figured it our before the end of the day.

During the weekend I experiments with JQuery sortable and managed to get the basic functionality working. Tomorrow I have to make sure that the result of resorting actually gets saved as well.

Tonight I submitted my proposal for the final project (crowdsourced fashion designs), hopefully it will get approved.

Week 7 - Thursday

Last day of pairing, so sad. We worked on a RSS reader today, which was another good opportunity to practice our Backbone knowledge. The project went pretty smooth and we had some time left to build in some additional features.

Tomorrow we start a multi-day solo project making a Trello clone. Having never worked with Trello before I explored its features a bit tonight. Overall I recognize some features we have worked on as well the past couple of day. I am hoping Bootstrap will help in generating a pretty layout. The project is pretty exciting as well will be integrating a lot of different things together.

Week 7 - Wednesday

OMG so much better! Today was great. It started o

ff with a lecture given by CJ in which he went over a basic Backbone application. I wish we had this lecture a couple days ago, the overall structure started to make so much more sense. After the lecture we started working on a simple Journal app. For this app we went through the entire process from beginning to end, this really helped in understanding how the different pieces connected together. My awesome partner Andrew and I were able to finish pretty quickly and therefor had a bit of time to practice our CSS skills.

On the left side you see an index of existing posts. If you click on the link of one of them it will show its content on the left side. Rather than having a link to an edit page we built in a feature that allowed the user to double click on the content they wanted to edit and an edit box would show up (see above).

Tomorrow we will work on our final pairing project. Time flies!

Week 7 - Tuesday

Today we continued working on our Pokemon App and cleaned up our Javascript by moving the HTML parts to templates. These templates are similar to views in Ruby with the big difference that they will not be evaluated by the server but rather be rendered by the client to generate HTML. We were able to use a lot of the code we wrote yesterday as a base to create the templates. After this we worked on views and routing. Generally I am still not very confident with Backbone as the overall structure is not yet super clear.

Week 7 - Monday

The final week of the core curriculum is focused on Backbone. After a series of videos and a lecture we started working on our first Backbone project. We made an app for Pokemon players, in which you can select amongst a list of existing Pokemon, see their details as well as which toys were available. The really cool this about this project was that it is basically a one page site (see below screenshot).

In my mind I am already replacing the Pokemon with pretty dresses.

Overall I feel I still need to get into Backbone a bit more. It seems like there are a lot of different elements so still a bit hard to keep track of everything but I am confident this will improve over the next couple days.

Week 6 - Friday + weekend

Tomorrow we start with the final week of the main curriculum, which will be Backbone. Over the weekend we had many videos that introduced us to the different elements. It seems that with Backbone everything is coming together and after this week we should hopefully be well equipped to start on our final project. I am really looking forward to the final project and to integrate everything we have learned so far. I am still debating on my ideas for the final projects and whether or not it should be a clone or something new. Hopefully we will get some advice on this later this week.

On Friday we worked for the first time with AJAX. Building a simple Twitter app. Using AJAX we were able to build in cool features like real-time user search and infinite tweets. Both features that would be nice to reuse in a final project also.

Week 6 - Thursday

Today we continued working with JQuery and we made our first set of Jquery Plugins that allows for interactive browsers. Each of the exercises contributed to getting a better understanding of how JQuery objects behave. I especially enjoyed making the last plugin which displays a set of thumbnails and shows a bigger version on click or mouseover. It is always very exciting when something works on the first try.

Tomorrow we will have the 5th assessment which will cover JavaScript. Doing many of exercises from the past week and a half again it amazes me again how much faster I can solve them only a couple days later. Fingers crossed for the assessment tomorrow.

Screenshot of the thumbnails plugin

Week 6 - Tuesday

Third time's a charm. TicTacTac and Towers of Hanoi were back again today. However this time we focused on creating a browser interface using JQuery rather than the underlying model of the game. Creating it in the browser improved the user interface dramatically. Where before we had to type in beginning and end coordinates in the terminal we were now able to just use the mouse while playing the game. The last assignment of the day was snake. Pretty cool is this is one of the earliest computer games I remember playing. At the moment I have a single snake that moves over the screen and responds to arrow keys so it still needs a bit more work before it is presentable.

Week 6 - Tuesday

It was super fun working with CSS today and awesome to learn more on how we can make our things look nicer. The main challenging is familiarizing myself with the proper way to position things on the screen (position absolute, relative, static or float) while avoiding the use of tables. We replicated the layout of a couple website and learned some cool things like hover, display none and box-sizing. Using lists and floats allows you to create horizontal lists which was pretty neat as well. Overall I really enjoyed today but CSS is definitely going to require some more practice.

Tomorrow we will start JQuery and we will create some nice interfaces for games we made last week. I also had some time tonight to practice for the assessment on Friday and supplemented the Jasmine tests based on earlier RSpec specs to practice some more problems.

I am still working on building in an algorithm into my TicTacToe to optimize the moves made by the computer based on the minimax algorithm but it is hard to find the time. For the time being I will enjoy beating the computer over and over again. :)

Week 6 - Monday

Today was quite exciting as we worked on our first browser based game: Asteroids! We used canvas 2d and implemented cool stuff like inheritance, randomly moving asteroids and a spaceship that could shoot. During the lecture we got inspired by some of the asteroid games past participants had built and after the core functionalities were implemented we started improving the layout a little bit. It was a very fun assignment plus very useful for our JavaScript knowledge.

Although the game still needs some more fine-tuning you can already destroy asteroids AND create nice art at the same time.

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