khandev

web dev, ios

[inspirationmobile]

A user interface is like a joke. If you have to explain it, it’s not that good. Google+ | Dribbble | Behance | Twitter | http://ramotion.com

[khandev]

A Notebook Per App?

For this entire summer, I’ve been working on a key project. It will be revealed soon. Yet, every where I go, I carry a notebook with all the drawings, plans and ideas that pop into my head. It is astonishing how far I have come thru with the plans. Every time the app opens up, I feel like a mother, only seeing the beautiful sketches that the app was and now so bright and friendly. 

So possibly a tip is to have a notebook per project and write all your plans, ideas. It is a record of a cool journey filled with learning new things and solving new problems. 

[khandev]

Visiting Old Projects

Sometime I enjoy going over the old code I've written for my projects. It's a peculiar experience. I do not write comments much so it's a rare experience to see a comment which allows me to focus on that moment. Today, I did go over a jQueryMobile project I did. Looking at the 200 lines of code, it's pretty straightforward. The funny thing is, I didn't actually know what I was doing when I wrote it. This also happens with large projects when the idea is bigger the methodology I follow to make it a reality. As a result, I end up with spaghetti code, not to mention the occasional long hours wasted messing with a line that won't work instead of understanding the entire scope. Ah...noobie mistakes. 

[khandev]

How to learn how to program

Programming is not something you study, memorize and implement. It's sort of like writing. You learn the grammar and then try to write a small essay and later work on a novel. In each endeavor, you will fail, forget words and have to research. So the bottom line is if you want to learn how to program, do projects! As many as you can. Struggle through them because the value lies in overcoming them. Stop making lists of what to learn ahead. Dive in! I guarantee you will catch up quickly. In my early programming stages, I regret reading too many books or watching all those repetitive videos. I really took off when I was able to tackle projects. And I learned that other programmers, even on large development teams still don't know concepts but look them up and keep going. Don't feel the need to study and attack the field so hard from the start.

[khandev]

Parse and Nodejs

I am currently build a single page application and wanted to use Parse as my backend. Why?

It's super simple to setup.

However, by making requests right from the single page app to the Node server and then making a request to Parse from there was an extremely tedious process. Not to mention, I also had to implement user sessions and more.

Solution

I opted in to use Parse on the client side. The downside to using that is the client id and key will be exposed. However, this can be mitigated if the class permissions and roles are properly set. Which, I was able to do?

My Reward

As soon as I began writing Parse code, with Backbone code, my work skyrocketed. Within an hour, I had setup a login, signup, and password retrieval system as well as a user session for the single page app. That's a week of work I spent trying to mess with Nodejs. 

[travistube]

Oh yeah

[khandev]

How I feel when programming in Javascript sometimes…