App Academy Daze

Chronicling the day to day at App Academy

[jorgerro]

w9d5

Last day of final project? Is that today??

I made substantial progress on my project but still feel like it needs more work. Though It's likely that I'll continue to feel that way no matter how much work I put into it. Also, I'll need to work on my demo as I don't feel like I presented it well. This weekend I spent some time adding a new feature that's all backbone and I'm aiming to stop working on it within the next two days.

I'm excited to meet the new class today! It's hard to believe we were in their shoes 9 weeks ago. Shout out to Jonathan, Tommy, and Katie for making my learning experience over the last 9 weeks an extraordinary one. We couldn't have asked for more talented and caring instructors :)

[jorgerro]

w9d4

Thursday!

I was pretty tired today so it was kind of slow for me. Spent a lot of time trying to write up some decent seed data and trying to get the seed to include photos. The rest of the day was spent building a search functionality that simply searches for rooms based on availability and region.

I'm excited to have something presentable and functional by the end of the day :)

[jorgerro]

w9d3

Today wasn't bad but I'm starting to feel like I'm a bit behind with my project. I added a dynamic calendar that updates pickable dates based on owner-specified availability and approved requests to stay in the space. I'm really happy with it, but it took a fair amt of time to get it to work properly.

All of my pages are styled as of right now, but I haven't implemented a search, which is what today will be about.

Tired but happy with my progress, almost there!

[jorgerro]

w9d2

Feeling the pressure!

This project has been a lot of fun so far, but I've also felt at least a little overwhelmed most of the time i've been working on it. It's stressful but it's starting to come together now so i'm happy with the way it's going.

Sorry Jonathan for missing my tumblr and report yesterday- it's harder to remember to do it now that there's the project to think about. By the way, great modal demo yesterday! Excited to get one of those into my website :)

[jorgerro]

w8d5

Frida was ok in terms of making progress on my project. I refactored some things I had been meaning to take care of and did some more figuring out of AWS and paperclip. Over the weekend I managed to add messages with threads, integrate geocoder, and add mapviews to my project. It was a lots of fun to see my maps on the page!

Because of that I spent a little less time practicing for the assessment, but still managed to do it a few times and learn something from going over the solutions afterward.

This week it's adding js to our projects and making them look really nice. It should be lots of fun!

[jorgerro]

w8d4

Final Project Day 4!

Today was good. It took a little longer than I wanted to make the notifications functional with text and urls and what not, but after some help with Jonathan I had some code that I liked. I was also able to get images to work for my site, both for a user avatar and other resources.

Today there's a surprise assessment! Not looking forward to it but I'm hoping to make Jonathan proud today :)

[jorgerro]

w8d3

Wow! three days into our final project already!

The first couple days felt a little overwhelming, but I feel like I'm getting a handle on it now. I think in the beginning it's hard to keep track of all the things that need to be done and make good choices about how to approach the overall design of the project.

I'm done with most of the basic features and spent the evening working on the notification functionality, which I'll have to finish tomorrow morning.

So far, the project has been a good experience. I got so into it that I forgot to do my tumblr and report yesterday- sorry Jonathan! :(

[jorgerro]

w8d2

full steam ahead!

sorry forgot to do this last night :(

[jorgerro]

w8d1

Final Project Day 1!

Started today feeling a little worried and overwhelmed by starting our final project, but I felt better as the day went on. Jonathan encouraged us to take on one part of the site at a time and build each feature before moving on the the next. This is a much better strategy than trying to start all of the features and and building them all at once, which was my first instinct.

I'm happy with my decision to clone airbnb and am looking forward to further developing it these next couple weeks.

There's a presentation on Friday. Naturally, it'll be a competition, so I've gotta get hustling on this project ;)

[jorgerro]

w7d5

Today was great! It was finally Jonathan and Tommy day! We all came in dressed like our instructors and were glad that they enjoyed it as much as we did :)

Also, it was my birthday and we all went out to lunch together in our matching outfits to celebrate the final day of instruction. Today was all about CSS and we had lots of fun recreating images and then actual web pages (like the google home page) using CSS.

This weekend we're doing paper prototyping in preparation for our final project and preparing for our second-to-last exam. Time flies!

[jorgerro]

w7d4

Day 3 of Backbone today, and I feel like I'm starting to really get the hang of it's structure. Today we got started on a clone of a site called Trello. It came with some struggles but also cleared up some of the major questions I had about the framework this week.

I'm pretty beat after this week and am looking forward to getting some rest this weekend. Tomorrow's our last day of pair programming, I guess from now on I'll have to be content to talk to myself while programming for a while...

Next week is final projects!

[jorgerro]

w7d3

Hey there dedicated readership! Short post today since I spent a bunch of time researching sites to clone for my final project last night.

The project seems daunting as every time I think about the website's features, I can't help but think of all the things I would have to do to make it work :/

Today in class we had some more good old-fashioned Backbone fun! We experimented with RSS feeds to make a news reader app that was single-page. Learned more about using Bb collections and started playing with sending custom json responses.

Thursday we're cloning Trello! It should be fun :)

[jorgerro]

w7d2

First Backbone app today- what a dream!

A simple single page journaling app was today's order and it was pretty cool to get to use the Backbone that we've been studying since the weekend. All of Ned's errors in the videos came in handy while developing our own today. Also, final project proposals are due this week! So exciting!

Tomorrow it's a news reader app. Here's hoping for clearer skies (literally)!

[jorgerro]

w7d1

Hey chill dudes! Week 7 day 1 was such a dream!

Got to building some sweet code that emulated Backbone methods and structure, and consequently started to appreciate having Backbone without every having actually used it. I think that's kinda neat.

Tomorrow we dive head-first into a Bb-frontended app. So long AJAX requests!

[jorgerro]

w6d5

Whoa! Was that week six that just flew by?? I think it was!

So, basically, we learned javascript this week and started in using it along with Rails and AJAX. Lots of new stuff and it continues next week with Backbone. Gonna start building some snappy looking stuff without all those pesky page refreshes.

Next week is the last week before we start our capstone projects. Am I in a tunnel, and is that light I see at the end of it?

[jorgerro]

w6d4

Hey there FAM. This post will be coming to you directly from that easternmost of all projects, stuy town. I'm 11 floors up but that high is nowhere near as good as the one I get when I'm coding some sweet JS/jQ combos. I mean, talk about good times!

My puzzle drive went into overdrive as we were thrown into the deep end of jQuery, trading in our CLI's for some gooood CLI-ckable html ;)

Today's material was fun and interesting, and there was also some CSS practice involved, which was cool after all the lecture tease that's been happening. Tomorrow it's a veritable cornucopia of concepts! Fresh material abounds as we add AJAX to the repertoire and do a little old-fashioned Rails apping.

Also, it's Friday. Does it get any better??

[jorgerro]

w6d3

We made Asteroids today! It was fantastic!

First time using html canvas and lots of cool jQuery stuff.

Also there was lots of homework so this post will end right... now.