App Academy Dailies

[iannknguyen]

W9D5 - Capstone

:o)

[iannknguyen]

W9D4 - Almost there

The finish line is close.

[iannknguyen]

W9D3 - More Capstone

We had peer reviews today on our projects. Most of it was positive. I managed to fix some minor issues today so that leaves implementing my last feature before I can start doing final touches.

[iannknguyen]

It was good

[iannknguyen]

W9D1 - Capstone Week 2

Week 2 of Capstone doesn’t start as well as I hoped, but I still got a decent amount of stuff done.

Implemented a user show page and some additional CRUD functionality to reviews. I’m currently working on connecting everything together. Tomorrow hopefully I can implement the user upload image feature and finish the backend for creating a professor.

[iannknguyen]

W8D5 - Capstone Week 1 Completed

Week 1 of or Capstone projects has finished. I’m really enjoying my project. With simple functionality and some decent styling, I’m happy with my app’s balance of features and design. Tomorrow I’m going to into overdrive and beginning to add the bonus features I proposed to include in my project proposal.

[iannknguyen]

W8D4 - Capstone Day 3

Good progress again today. Added the main table to my schema, implemented another Flux Store, and created the skeleton for all my React components. That leaves actually displaying the information that I want displayed and of course styling. My app is very simple, but should be completely functional by Saturday. Which leaves the second week to implement some bonus features and other features I haven’t thought of.

[iannknguyen]

W8D3 - Capstone Day 2

Progress was good today. Implemented 2 Flux stores into my project, which leaves one more. Also got some decent styling to the home page. I’m hoping to complete my minimum viable product by the end of this week, and it seems like I’m on track to do so.

[iannknguyen]

W8D2 - Capstone Day 1

First day went well. Encountered a few hiccups but for the most part was productive, mainly because I started a little earlier on my project and I didn’t have any issues with my proposal. Tomorrow I’ll be implementing Flux and tab functionality into my project.

[iannknguyen]

W8D1 - BenchBnB Pt. 2

Today we continued working on BenchBnB. The focus of the second part was to implement some of the more complex features into the application. The key feature being React-Router, to have the entire application run in a single page. This helped me be more confident with implementing this feature into my capstone, however I still continue to choke with implementing features in the Flux pattern. Flux continues to give me trouble. I understand the big picture, but get lost in all the functions. I’m hoping it will become natural as I implement it in my capstone, which starts tomorrow.

[iannknguyen]

W7D5* - BenchBnB & The Beginning of the End

As week 7 comes to an end, so marks the end of the curriculum. It seems like it’s solo for the final 4 weeks. Going into our Capstone projects, we will be using everything we’ve learned in the past 8 weeks to build our own fully functional web application. Our capstone projects will be the main highlight of our portfolios for employers to see.

Project

Today we worked on creating an AirBnB clone, probably for the purpose of easing us into our capstones. I’m pleased with my progress today and almost made it to the bonus features. I’m feeling pretty optimistic and excited to complete it. The biggest feature was implementing the GoogleMaps API, which to my surprise was much simpler than I imagined. 

Weekend & Monday

We’re continuing our AirBnB clone and working on our project proposals. Should be a pretty eventful weekend.

But today some much needed relaxation and celebration. I made it!

[iannknguyen]

W7D4* - React Router

Today we combined everything we learned this week. Rails + React + Flux + React Router.

Project

We created a sweet Pokedex.  With the addition of React Router, we were able to render multiple views on one webpage. Starting with an index of Pokemon, clicking on them created a new tab that showed detailed info, and a list of their toys. Clicking on their toys did the same thing, all without refreshing the page or redirecting. It was all pretty cool and I’m glad today went pretty smooth. 

Tomorrow

The next two days we are building our own AirBnB. Should be good practice before our capstone projects.

[iannknguyen]

W7D3 - Rails + React + Flux

Short post today, will make up for it tomorrow or Friday. To some up, we worked on implementing the Flux architecture created by Facebook in our musical Organ app. Flux aims to make the data flow uni-directionally in your application to make it more structured and easier to debug.

[iannknguyen]

W7D2 - React + Rails

Jumping back into Rails after what feels like months in Javascript was a little unsettling, but I’m glad that I was still able to retain a lot of what we learned. 

Project

Today’s focus was to create a ToDo Rails, with React components on the front end. Since React uses Javascript, we added a whole other component to our application. This involved essentially replicating the Rails Controller structure in javascript and using Ajax requests to pull information from database that React could use. Although we only brushed the surface of this project, I feel like I essentially got the idea of how to implement something like this in the future.

Tomorrow

We’re starting Flux. 

[iannknguyen]

W7D1 - React

It’s nice knowing that App Academy is adapting and trying to move forward with its curriculum. Our cohort is the first to learn a relatively new javascript library called React. 

Project

React’s strength is it’s ability to render elements to the DOM faster than anything else. We eased into React today by creating some simple widgets: an autocomplete form, a clock and weather widget, and a tabs widget, (similar to the jQuery exercise). All of the widgets updated practically in real-time, and were not that complicated to make. We ended the day working on a Minesweeper game in the browser with React. So far it hasn’t been as bad as the other languages that we learned. With the help of JSX, React is much more intuitive and enjoyable.

Tomorrow

More React stuff. Because everyone, including the TAs, is learning React, we’re going at a somewhat slower pace, which is a nice opportunity to really understand how to use it. From what everyone’s been saying, React seems to be the next big thing that companies will be looking for. How exciting.

[iannknguyen]

W6D5 - Ajax

Another week down. Today’s blog will be short. We worked with Ajax today which makes for very cool asynchronous web apps. We used this in conjunction with our knowledge of jQuery plugins to add some nice functionality to our Twitter clone skeleton.

[iannknguyen]

W6D4 - jQuery Plugins

Today’s topic was jQuery plugins. I really enjoy jQuery, so plugins that makes common tasks simpler and more efficient are of very welcoming. I’ve taken for granted all the beautiful web animations and styling that I see everyday on common websites and never realized the complexity behind it. Today’s projects gave me a chance to understand that.

Project

Our projects were to create our own jQuery plugins. Our first plugin was to create a simple tab interface that allowed us to prevent the default action of clicking a link and display information about the currently selected tab. We used dog breeds as tabs and had their breed info in the article. Then, with some additional jQuery and CSS magic, had them fade in and out between switching. It was all very satisfying.

Our second plugin was to create an image carousel plugin. We got the functionality behind displaying the next and previous images, but struggled with the CSS to have to images slide in and out from their respective sides. I’m paying a lot more attention to all the javascript and jQuery on every website that I got to from now on.

Tomorrow

We’re working on AJAX. I don’t have any idea about what that is yet. I wish we had one more day with javascript and jQuery. It’s becoming a lot more enjoyable.