Dive into Programming ;)

Blog to keep track of my programming progress and my App Academy experiences

[idrinkblacktea]

Building a new computer

So one of my long time dreams is build an awesome computer, and it's about to come true, hopefully this week if nothing goes wrong. I've gotten some pretty good parts and very excited to build it, I'm still waiting on the case and the cpu cooler, but the rest of the items are just sitting there in their wrappings practically asking me to build them. I also ordered a keyboard, the Black Widow Tournament Edition, which arrived today. OMG it's awesome. I'm just glad there's no one near me else they'd be like 'BE QUIET WITH THE KEYBOARD' since this thing's loud.

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Experience so far at Houzz

So I've been working at Houzz for almost 2 weeks now, so I figured I would write a post giving my updates on the job as well as how App Academy has prepared me.

I love it here so far. It's pretty much my dream job. Nice office, friendly coworkers, hacking away at code all day looking cool, see below.

Okayyy so it's not like that, but that's how I imagine myself since I'm still a noob. Someday I'll become the computer hacker!

Okay onto more details about my actual job. I've just been working on some tools that's helping me learn more about the codebase. I had never touched PHP before this and have only heard horror stories about it. It's definitely not something I'm used to, but it was surprisingly not THAT bad. In fact, it's starting to grow on me. Other than that, I've just been working with javascript. My buddy (mentor) has been teaching me alot about the codebase as well as coding style. The most nerve wracking thing for me so far was the whole git flow process. My process when working on my personal projects was just 

-write code

-git add -A

-git commit -m 'blah'

-git push

However, now that I'm working on a large codebase with other people, I have to use branches, merge, pulling, and more. I'm always afraid of committing the wrong thing, merging the wrong things. I guess this will just come with time and experience. What helped me so far was using a git client (smartgit), which is pretty good, it also avoids having to write merge messages when I merge branches on command line (vim pops up and I'm like AHHH, time to google =_=). 

I can say that App Academy has definitely helped in a tremendous amount. Never did I think that with 3 months of learning I can become a developer but it has actually became true. For those people that are considering App Academy, I say go for it!! It can seriously change your life.

I'll probably keep this blog updated if I work on any more cool features. I also have a few side projects I'd like to do but haven't really had the time to work on them so far. Top of my list right now is learning swift and making an iOS app! If anyone's interested in working/learning with me, send me an email @ [email protected].

[idrinkblacktea]

Winding down on my job search...

So I've been job hunting for almost 2 weeks now. I'm happy to say I've probably reached an ending point now. I've had a bunch of phone calls/running around in the city/being nervous/losing sleep over thinking things. The one feeling I have after all this is a feeling of unbelievable-ness. I was able to use what I learned to help me find a job. This is probably the first time I can confidently say that. After college, I definitely had a difficult time finding anything even though I graduated from a good college with a difficult major. This is a definite testament to the effectiveness of App Academy. I definitely thank all the instructors for all that they've taught me and I'm excited to embark on the next part of my life as a developer! If anyone has any questions, send to [email protected], I'll be happy to answer anything regarding App Academy/job searching/working as a new dev!!

[idrinkblacktea]

W9D5 Done with Final Projects

Everyone presented their final projects on Friday, and I was pretty impressed by the projects that everyone did. There were a bunch of really cool ideas/designs that I'd love to try myself when I get the opportunity. I'm probably going to try to build some app with sounds whenever I have freetime. Starting Monday we'll be moving onto the job searching part of the curriculum, which means we'll be stepping back abit from writing code 9-6 and focus on algorithms/interview prep, and most importantly, trying to get a job. This'll be the most nerve wracking part, and I hope I'll be able to land that dream developer job. As a result of moving into the job searching phase, I didn't actually end up doing much programming this weekend, mostly fixing my resume/social media accounts. I'll probably spend the next few days finishing up my portfolio website. www.austerchen.com.

Good luck to everyone and hopefully we all get amazing jobs fast!! :)

[idrinkblacktea]

W9D4 Final Project Completed

Well, I'm here after 9 weeks of long hours of programming. I've learned alot during my 9 weeks here and I'm sure the remaining time I'll still be learnings lots. I've reached a stopping point with my final project and I'm fairly satisfied with it. It has some pretty nice features and looks similar to Airbnb that I was trying to clone. I had the most fun with using canvas though out of the whole experience. I'll probably use some time and explore kinetic.js on my own later. Tomorrow we'll be presenting our final projects to new students that are about to undergo what we just finished. I'm excited for the next phase of searching for a job. I really want to get a developer job and I know that'll be my dream job. I love web development and I'm excited to be able to call myself a developer !

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W9D3 Running pikachu

It's been almost 2 weeks since we started our final projects. I must say I'm pretty impressed with what I have so far. I found that the most time consuming task on my final project was working on the CSS, trying to make sure it looks nice to potential employers. I spent today using canvas sprite animations to create a running pikachu. This took abit more work than I expected since I first had to piece together a bitmap for the running sprite. However, I definitely got a much better understanding of how sprite map works now. Maybe I'll use some time to make some other games using it when I got the time. Other than that, I also got guest login working, which also contains a cool typing animation that looks really cool.

www.pokevisit.com to see my progress!

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W9D2 More Pokevisit!

Today was productive-ish for me. I managed to finish 2 key features and also an extra one, but I'm still lacking on reviews for listings (which I might not implement after all). I finished linking up the landing page search form to my backbone app by passing in query params in the URL. It took awhile and a lot of JS code to get it working. I'll probably refactor the code when I have time ( probably not), but if it works that's more than enough. I also linked up the other page's header search bar. So if you search through it it'll redirect you to the main page with query params. My method was again kind of janky, I had to reattach the autocomplete every time the backbone router matched a new route or else the auto complete would not fire some times. I'm sure there's a better way to do it, or maybe not given my set up. What I've learned using Backbone is that it definitely makes life alot easier by organizing all your JS code into object oriented concepts, but you have to really keep track of when a view is rendering, whether an element is on the page, or else you'll end up with really complicated code.!

www.pokevisit.com to view my progress! It looks good so far.

[idrinkblacktea]

W9D1 PROJECT!

We're coming up close on our instructions at app academy(well still post course)! Everyone's been busy working on final projects. Personally I'm excited to see what everyone ends up building. I'm pretty much done with all the core functionalities of airbnb. Now it's just some more styling and extra features I can think of to make the site even better and even cooler!

[idrinkblacktea]

W8D3, Final Projects!

We just finished our 2nd day of final projects. I'm feeling good about my progress so far. I have a working map/price/checkin/out date/number of guests/room type filter by the end of the day. It definitely wasn't easy. I had to constantly remember which part I was working on, which file I was just on. I think as the project gets bigger everything becomes more disorganized. I just finished to get a bootstrap carousel working on the show page. However, my show page is far from done, there's horrible styling on all of the images, as well as nothing other than the carousel. I actually had a difficult time implementing the carousel. I tried to use a jquery plugin. However, no matter what i did, it just wouldn't work (I think it's b/c the dom element wasn't rendered yet). I even tried to use the settimeout trick. At the end, I just manually placed a bootstrap carousel in, which still ended up causing alot of trouble. I definitely need to finish the show view tomorrow since I don't even have the whole reservation part setup yet, which is an important part of Airbnb!

www.pokevisit.com to see my progress so far

[idrinkblacktea]

W8D2 Final Projects

We continued to work on final projects today after the backbone quiz. I felt like I made good progress on my project today. I got a map loaded and was able to filter out results based on geo location data, which was pretty exciting. I even added a search form which made use of Google's auto complete Api, I think using the core functionalities isn't that difficult, not customizing it might be a challenge later on. I also added a jQuery slider that allows me to filter by price as well. I'll probably take the index view with the pictures and the show pages tomorrow since those two features are pretty key. Check www.pokevisit.com to see my current progress.

[idrinkblacktea]

W8D1 Trello and Moving to final projects

We worked on trello today, and I got mine to have the basic features(or feature to be correct) just moving around cards/lists and persisting to the database. After that I got started on my airbnb clone, I made the login/sign ups modal with some 3rd party jquery code, and it looks great. I'm looking forward to fleshing out my final project and having something awesome by the end of the 2 weeks.

Site: www.pokevisit.com

[idrinkblacktea]

W7D5, Trello/Backbone

We are starting soon on our final projects. With yesterday, we've pretty much covered everything that we'll need in order to do a final project. We started with trello today and went about how to design and approach a bigger and more complicated site. We learned about how we have to build in slices(one full feature at a time from bottom up) rather than in layers. They really stressed this point since they don't want us stuck with nothing to show by end of Week 9. I'm really excited to finish up trello this weekend and get started on some bigger project. I can finally put everything I've learned into use!!

As for trello today, I finished boards index, along with list item and card items, which is pretty good for the first day. The next feature I'm trying to implement is drag and drop using jquery UI's library. I played around with it abit and found it to be fairly simple to use. I just have to figure out the logic of updating the order of different items.

[idrinkblacktea]

W7D4 More Backbone/Ruby Thanksgiving event

Today was exciting as I had met with Matz, the designer of ruby. He gave a talk at Heroku's HQ as to the future of ruby as well as some general Q&A. Although most of the subjects he covered were more advanced than what I could handle, there were definitely things that I understood even if a little bit. As I progress in my developer career I'll definitely try to attend more and more of these events.

As to today's project, we built a news reader app by utilizing more advanced backbone techniques like subviews as well as swapping views. I think I'm still a little confused as to how everything is rendered sometimes, so I definitely need to walk through each page refresh bit by bit to know exactly what's going on. With today and tomorrow's lecture, we pretty much have learned enough knowledge to get us started on our final projects, which will be the upcoming tuesday. We'll have almost 2 weeks to finish it and I plan to pump out an awesome AirBnb clone!!

Newsreader code: https://github.com/Teaflavored/newsreader

[idrinkblacktea]

W7D3 More Backbone

We just finished the 3rd day of playing with backbone. So far I'm liking it alot. I think in general I'm just liking the javascript language more and more. Of course I still prefer ruby, but javascript has neat features that starts to grow on you. For today's project we built a journal app that utilized backbone events and templates. I think with this, we pretty much have covered all the core functionalities of backbone. The events we covered today allow us to do what we were doing in jquery, i.e. submitting forms and other interactive things. Although the project itself wasn't too interested, I definitely feel much better on backbone events and using ejs templates now. I think there's a few other more topics we still  haven't covered including composite views and zombie routers, but by the end of the week we'll probably be able to use those effectively as well.

We're also going to have to submit final project ideas soon. I'm probably going to do an AirBnB since it has many features that I can showcase.

Journal App code: https://github.com/Teaflavored/journal-app

[idrinkblacktea]

W7D2 More Pokedex, Backbone views/router

We continued with yesterday project by adding more backbone components including views and routers to our collections and models. Views and router gave us another way to modularize our code and make sure that our app is well organized and easily maintainable. The project today was simply to take what we had before (everything stuffed into one big view class) and separate it out into different backbone view objects. One difficult thing I found was that since we had built a backbone collection in one of the index views and we needed the collection in multiple places. It was very difficult to get access to that as we either needed to pass the collection around in the views or find a way to access the collection through one of the existing view objects. Hopefully we'll learn a better way to address this issue. Other than that, the project went pretty well and I'm pretty impressed by the end product( we had extra time to implement fancy edit forms as well as filepicker)

code: https://github.com/Teaflavored/pokedex2

[idrinkblacktea]

W7D1 Pokedex on backbone

First day of using backbone today. Backbone is a front-end MVC framework for organizing javascript code into our traditional models/view/controllers. For today, we only dealt with the model layer with backbone models and collections. Our project was to build a single page podex app (can be seen below).

What we're doing on backbone is moving alot of the work to the client instead of reissuing many http requests with just rails. This way we can avoid pages that can take awhile to load and still be able to present some of the data. Since we've been doing javascript/jquery past couple of weeks, backbone isn't particularly too difficult. Coupled with the fact that the MVC models is similar to rails, I picked up on backbone pretty fast and am enjoying using it. However, since we only used the model/collection layer today we haven't gotten around to using backbone events. Right now we're still using our jquery events and writing out the long/somewhat unorganized event handlers and callbacks. hopefully this will be addressed tomorrow when we start on the view and controller layer. Tomorrow's project will be to expand on today's pokemon app so pretty excited about that too!

Here is the pokemon code so far: https://github.com/Teaflavored/pokedex

[idrinkblacktea]

W6D5 AJAX

We did AJAX today, another function on the jQuery library, although javascript also has this functionality. Ajax stands for Asynchronous Javascript and XML. It's used to make background requests and avoid http requests, which can cause white pages to show, detracting from the User Experience. If you can see from my twitchy gif. That's pretty much what we built today. A few simple functionalities on top of a twitter like app. Although what we added doesn't seem like much, it was definitely a very good exercise and helped me understand more about jQuery, event handling/delegation, as well as Ajax in general.

Starting next week, we'll be starting on backbone, a MVC framework for the frontend. I had previously thought front end was mostly about HTML and CSS but it is much more than that. All the JS and Jquery to make your website amazing adds so much more complexity to frontend development. I am definitely enjoying what we've been doing since we started JS, and I'm looking forward to finishing up Backbone and doing our final projects!!

Here is my AJAX twitter code if anyone's interested. The bulk of the plugins are in assets/javascript - https://github.com/Teaflavored/ajaxTwitter