App Academy NYC

[haasalex16]

W9D4

Another day working on my SoundCloud clone and even though it was very productive I feel like I just keep seeing new things that need to be completed before presentations tomorrow. That being said, the main thing that I completed today was getting my audio to automatically stream from song to song and stay on the current list (Stream, User Feed, Playlist) even while navigating through the site while it is playing. This was accomplished by creating one 'universal player' that would be injected with the source and album art when you pressed play on the individual song. I also created individual collections for each view that you were on (stream, feed, playlist) and then assigned that collection to a queue in the audio player so that it would be able to keep track of the full list of songs that you originally pressed play on. Like I said, I keep on finding little things that need to be tweaked before I am 100% happy with the product but I am glad that I have all of my main features working and tomorrow I hope to wrap everything up before presenting to the class.

[haasalex16]

W9D3

Today I worked on one of my last features and with the help of PgSearch it came together very nicely. As you could have guessed, you are now able to search for users, playlists, and songs by name/title all in the same search. What may have been a tall task was easily conquered by PgSearch that once loaded and you properly identify what models and attributes you would like to be searched it creates a polymorphic table to hold everything and makes the combined search very easy.

Per usual, the more time consuming part was creating views for everything as I needed to create custom widgets for a user, song, and playlist in the search result in order to keep them looking uniform and then formatted it to have tabs to limit your search to only Songs, Playlists, OR Users if you want to use that as your search criteria. At the end of the day I spent a few hours cleaning up CSS and making the views a lot more presentable.

Tomorrow I need to finish my music stream by making it able to continuously play through your stream / playlist and then I wont add any new features and only focus on display.

[haasalex16]

W9D2

Only a few more days left until presentations and today I worked on file upload and audio streaming. To achieve this I set up image uploads (album art and user avatars) and audio uploads using Paperclip, Amazon S3 and Figaro for key security. As of now I decided to just use the basic HTML audio tag for streaming to make sure everything is up and running by Fri but hopefully I can got back and implement something like wavesurfer.js for a more visual player. The last feature I want to have done will be searchable which I hope to finish tomorrow in order to allow for a day or 2 of CSS and overall site design.

[haasalex16]

W9D1

Today I began to work on updating a few of my views to properly show user's information (followers, feeds, playlists) and hoped to finish around lunch to get started on file uploads but next thing I knew it was the end of the day. That being said I did go back and revamp a lot of my code and got the UI a lot smoother but I definitely got a good lesson in properly budgeting my time. It is really easy to get side tracked while working on CSS and UI since it never feels like it is over but tomorrow I will set aside the full day to complete file uploads and then Wednesday to complete search-ability do hopefully be done with all my features with two days to work on CSS and final touches.

[haasalex16]

W8D5

Today I finally feed like I am getting somewhere with EclecticEar as I added the ability to tag songs with genres, create playlist, and have been focusing a lot more on css to keep the site looking presentable. On that note, today we ended the day with presentations of where everyone is at. I think that I will have my site in a real good place before next week's final presentation but before then I need to practice describing my site better and the technical feats I had while building it. On Monday I hope to go over all of my features and make sure that they are working smoothly and that the UI and design is clean before implementing my last two features; searchability and then uploading music files as well as user images/album art.

[haasalex16]

W8D4

One third done with final projects and I am feeling pretty good with it. I have completed User Show pages and a User Index page with a follow/unfollow toggle button on it. I had the backend for following working pretty quickly but my main hold up was converting it over to Backbone. Once completing this later in the day I began putting together the schema/models/controllers for song Tagging and once again have it working in Rails but converting to BB is taking slower than I planned. Tomorrow I hope to get taggings completed and begin working playlist creation.

[haasalex16]

W8D3

Two days down on the final project and I feel like I am making good progress. The first half of the day I spent cleaning up some views and code from yesterday to make sure I was happy with it before moving on and then started on adding a 'Follow' feature. I got everything working properly in Rails pretty quickly but then spent the rest of the day trying to get the information to display properly in Backbone. Currently The feature is not 100% working on the site and I hope to get it done by lunch tomorrow before moving on.

[haasalex16]

W8D2

Today we started our first day of our final projects which we have nine days to complete. For my project I have chosen to clone the music service, SoundCloud.

For the first day I had planned to complete user Authentication as well as the basic user and song models. After completing this I implemented Backbone and began putting together BB views, collections, and models. Tomorrow I plan to start doing user show pages as well as the ability to follow users and have their music show up on your feed.

[haasalex16]

W8D1

Today we wrapped up our last assignment with App Academy before starting our final projects; a Trello Clone. This clone was given to us with most of the Rails already built so that we could focus on the Backbone portion which was very helpful. This was the first time I used composite views which caused some of my progress to slow down but after a while I got the hang of it. Unfortunately I did not get to add the feature of dragging around the lists with jQuery but I hope to review the code and possibly implement it in my final project; a SoundCloud clone.

[haasalex16]

W7D4

Today we had out last pair programming day and for our last day my partner and I built a RSS feed reader with Backbone and Rails. This assignment was a lot like yesterday's which allowed us to complete pretty early and get some practice with CSS as well as some additional functionality. From now on I will be solo so I will be able to really see how well I understand everything we have learned these past 7 weeks.

[haasalex16]

W7D3

Today we continued working with Backbone by building a Journal App on Rails. It was real good to start from scratch and see how Rails, JS, Backbone, and jQuery all came together. Other than the basic setup with Rails, we used Backbone for the views, router, and models which allowed us to do some pretty cool things, including an immediate editing option that was triggered by a double click on the field you would like to edit and we would seamlessly which the field to editable input. Today really showed the power of Backbone and how seamless it can make a site run.

[haasalex16]

W7D2

Today we completed our 2 day project of creating a Pokedex by converting the views over to Backbone and creating templates for them. Once the views were completed to created routes in BB so that when you picked a Pokemon's card and it displayed it's details along with updating the URL to Pokemon/:id. Previously, the url would stay at the root while navigating between different Pokemon since all our work was done on a single page, which would lead to difficult navigation by the user if trying to return to a certain page (view) and did not remember their click history.

[haasalex16]

W7D1

Today we started our last large section of curriculum... Backbone. Backbone is a framework that allows you to build your JS code into Model, Collections, Routes, and Views with the help of jQuery and UnserscoreJS. Today we mainly focused on creating models and collections and began to build a "semi" single page application. I really like how seamless clicking around a BB application is because it does not re-load a page and makes it work very quickly. Tomorrow we start to focus on Views so hopefully I will learn a lot more about what BB has to offer.

[haasalex16]

W6D5

Today we wrapped up our Javascript curriculum by learning AJAX. AJAX is "asynchronous JavaScript and XML" which allows you to run queries and functions in the background of your page without having to reload the page. We utilized this to build twitter plug-ins including a reactive button to follow/unfollow people as well as disable it while a request was pending as well as real-time searching that would fire off a search query with every character that was put in and not wait until 'search' was clicked. Not only was this a real neat feature to learn but it also gave us a lot of practice with jQuery to get me ready for Backbone starting next week.

[haasalex16]

W6D4

Today we continued with JQuery by creating plug ins for a fading info box and an image carousel. Doing the design with CSS and HTML wasn't too tough but the difficulty came when properly using JQuery to handle events and transitions. In order to help handle everything we utilized the .on and .one functions as well as the use of 'transitionend' which are all really cool JQuery tricks. Tomorrow we will start to combine everything we have learned back into Rails so it will be very interesting to see how everything will come together.

[haasalex16]

W6D3

Today we took what we have been working on the past week with JS, JQuery, CSS, and HTML and create Tic-Tac-Toe, Towers of Hanoi, and then snake. Once given the basic logic of the games (which we had already done in RUby and JS) It was surprising how simple it was to get a game rendering in the browser and animating it with JQuery. By simply changing the CSS class with JQuery it really opens up a lot of freedom in what I will be able to do in the browser.

[haasalex16]

W6D2

Another day another language... and today was CSS. For a few days we have been having 'lightning lectures' on CSS but it wasn't until today that we really got to commit a full day to it. Overall I thought it was a pretty straightforward language that can allow you to style a page quickly and efficiently. One of the most challenging things of I thought was properly tagging and assigning classes to your HTML so that you could easily access them in CSS. Once my partner and I locked down what we wanted on our page's structure (building a basic Facebook clone) we were able to really get moving on the visual design and felt like a very productive day. I could really see myself doing a lot more front end stuff in the future so I to go back and add CSS styling to my old projects and focus on all that CSS has to offer.