This week was a big blur again - it should be remembered as the burning elevator week.
DT decided to introduce TDD into warmups, which was a nice brain exercise! I'd really like to know how to use these in actual applications.
We had our first look at backbone this week, and intense, horrible painful experience with it towards the end when we were given a lab notoriously called 'burning airlines' (previously called Virgin airlines, but affectionately changed due to it's difficultly to complete in such little time).
There was a midweek intermission where we went for a field trip to ninefold and looked at a server farm where the elevator part of this week comes in:
All 18 of us decided to get into a lift(capacity 20) to get to level 16 of the building where said server farm lived.
It was no big deal, we fit, we hit the button.
As we watched the elevator's display tick up to 16, it stopped, and promptly plummeted back to level one. We all felt it, didn't think much of it, but it went on to happen again and again, the bottom floor which we'd return to growing by one each time, for a total of six times, until eventually someone hit stop and called for help.
There is a ride in Disney parks called Tower of Terror that this day certainly reminded me of.
We didn't end up coding much that day, Tarun's second Job seeking skills session was in the afternoon, which was then followed up by a little bit more backbone.
The next day Joel showed us how to hook rails up to backbone, which led us finally to Burning Airlines. He warned us of a so-called “Supergroup” of two people that’d be half the size of the other teams, while the others would be chosen by ruby (peeps.shuffle.pop(4)), and as some people speculated, Allen and I was in the group of two.
The brief did actually have Virgin Airlines written in it, and apparently didn’t use Backbone originally. That’s where the burning comes from.
Allen and I first had a discussion on how we wanted to approach this - he hasn’t done model intensive work so far, and I’ve done quite a bit in my last two projects. Was it that we wanted to learn the most from this or see how much we could get done in the allotted time ( it was due at 4:30 the next day). Neither of us were bothered by the decision, so we flipped a coin: fast as we could it was.
I set up the models in Rails while Allen did most of the set up on Backbone models, collections and router. I joined him after the setup since the rails side was super fast, starting on the templates and adding to the views.
This exercise really helped me pick up a work flow of a Backbone application, models/collections, router, templates, views.
We ended up making some really weird bugs(one you'd click a link to an airplane and it'd navigate you to links 1-max airplane number ticking upwards) and luckily Allen's favorite thing is fixing bugs.
We ended up being a good team - I write code faster than he does and the bugs I'd rather not work on Allen would fix. Discussion on how to solve issues was also a great aspect on my team because we would both have opinions on how to approach it, and we are both ready to work on the better solution.
We finally got to the presentation time - nobody competed it, apparently the worst ever attempt was a give-up-after-three-hours attempt from a previous class. Everyone attempted it in ours!
Allen and I did manage to get our goal - to have real time update of seat bookings working across different users/browsers will polling (setting an interval to send fetch requests every second).
The most important thing I learned this week:
MVC translated into another language!
Things I need to remember:
Work on presentation skills. Practise more backbone
I've been using BackboneJS, Rails
titsay
baratheonpilled
kianamaiart
yousharknotpass
turnnoffyourmind
theartofmadeline
