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Problem Driven vs. Solution Driven

As a building Architect, I was presented with problems and I had to find solutions. The building site and use was already chosen and was tasked with crafting something within the confines of problem. In software, things are different.

As a software developer I have the ability to design and construct things that could interact with the physical world or remain in the digital one. I am now a walking set of solutions looking for a problem. And this strength of the field is also its greatest weakness. Nearly every software developer is a middle-class, white man in his mid 20's. These are the people who have the power to solve some of the world's most important problems. This is kind of terrifying.

I'm ready to take on a new side project. Instead of looking for one of the world's deepest problems, I'm going to build a music player that has a create your own visualizer. I am not saying that I don't care about improving the world, but I live in a tech bubble and its hard for me gain outside inspiration. So please, if anyone ever reads this, please shoot me an idea if you have one.

LocalHUNT update

Here is a link to the site http://tinylandmarks.herokuapp.com/

Here is a link to the github https://github.com/NathanSass/LocalHUNT

This project holds a special place in my heart, because I cut my teeth working with APIs and writing well organized MVC JS on this app. I recently revised it because I wanted to improve the flow of the app and get it up on heroku so I could begin beta testing it.

After putting the app aside for a month, it was extremely easy to hop back on and figure out the codebase. This is my first experience going back and re-reading my own code. I remember one of my previous challenges was dealing with the asynchronous processes relating to geolocation.

I wanted to make 2 major changes to the app:

1. Instead of the user clicking on the map and a location to add a marker. The marker would automatically be dropped where the user was and he/she could drag it somewhere else if he/she pleased.

- I wanted to make this change because I felt like most of the time a user would see something cool and want to immediately mark it. Chances are, the user would not know exactly where they were. Also, its more simple and I think it points to the on-the-go nature that I wanted for this app.

- This was rather difficult because I had to use nested click listeners to listen for when the markers started to be dragged and when it was done being dragged. When the marker was done being dragged, I would send a JSON object back to ruby land and tell sinatra to update the marker's location. I had errors if a marker was dragged and repositioned multiple times, so I had to remove click listeners to account for that.

- I am not the most proud of this method, but I think it is actually reasonably clear.

2. The other thing I wanted to change was have the user input the marker data in a form field instead of in a JS alert. I wanted to have only one button, but just change its function using JS.

The first time you click on the button, it shows a form field, The second time you click, it triggers the creation of a new marker and then hides the form field.

Overall, I like how this project is coming along. If I were to add functionality, it would be to allow a user to delete a marker that was dropped on that session. It shouldn't be too tough to implement.

#localHUNT #sinatra #javascript

SPOT: New map toy.

I've been kayaking a long time, but California is known for having extremely committing and difficult rivers. I had the incredible opportunity to do fantasy falls, which is a 3 day river section located a little south of Tahoe in the High Sierras. It's a run famous for its beauty, difficulty and secluded setting.

In the event that something bad should happen, it quickly becomes a very-very-very bad thing because of how difficult it would be to get help. This is where Spot comes in. It has two buttons, one calls a helicopter and the other sends an email to a select few people letting them know you are ok.

I sent a few transmissions while in the canyon and my loved ones really appreciated. When I got back, it was so cool to review these transmissions and see where I had camped those nights.

Normally these trips are a real blackbox experience. You put in one place and you take out somewhere entirely different. Since the gorges and rivers are so remote, the shuttle routes usually deviate extremely far from them so that also adds to the mystique of being in there.

Anyway, my camera immediately died so I am including some pics of other folks.

EPIC SWAP: GeoJSON and MapBox

We decided to use a MapBox map because of its extremely easy styling. You style the map on their website in their GUI and then reference it in your code.

MapBox is built on OpenStreetMaps which is built on Leaflet. Although the MapBox API is excellent, there are three levels of APIs that allow you to work with the maps which can create some confusion.

I am looking to graphically convey the skills of a user on the map. There are multiple ways to render markers on the map. I wanted three things:

1. To be able to control the markers, color and icon

2. To be able to control a property that would allow me to toggle its visibility with jquery .show(), .hide()

3. To be able to bind additional properties to it such as click listeners, and text boxes.

After some trial and error, I discovered GeoJson. GeoJson appears to be an industry standard for conveying map data. Using SimpleStyle with Geo JSON and the incredible MAKI library of icons. I was able to have all of the control that I wanted over creating and dropping my markers. Below is my GeoJson marker class

#mapbox #javascript #geojson #epicswap

DAY 39: Beginning Group Projects

This morning I pitched my app for a skills haring network to everyone at DBC. Speaking to 100 people is certainly a nerve-wracking experience but it is also very valuable. Anyway, I my app was selected and some of my very talented cohort mates decided to join me on the journey of developing this app.

I am going to explain in two parts:

The Polemic:

This app is designed to get you off the computer and in front of another person. It takes advantage of a talented population and peoples desire to learn and teach. In addition, it is easy for people to bond over the shared acquisition of knowledge. We want people to visually be able to see the community of people.

The Thesis:

We are using mapping technologies to visually display the community of people interested in learning and teaching. Using color coding and icons on the markers we are going to filter the available skills by category. In addition, users will have a profile page which is where users can get to know a little more about another user and contact them for an in person meeting.

My Team:

We are a group of 5 people. I feel like we got really lucky with this group. There is certainly a lot of talent.

I am posting two mockups for the app.

#epicswap #rails

Day 35: Rails App

I built a pretty cool application that mimics some of the functionality of StackOverflow. I called it Jokes Overflow. Working with rails has been quite an adventure. After gaining a solid understanding of sinatra, learning rails came quickly. I spent a lot of time learning Test Driven Development and making sure my rspec tests were up to snuff. I did a few cool things with this app. I used polymorphic inheritance to keep track of the votes, I implemented cookies so a user cannot vote multiple times on a given joke, and I attempted to use a semantic style html markup along with object oriented principles to style my css.

Below is the code for polymorphic inheritance in my migration

Below is my landing page. Here is a link to the site http://jokesoverflow.herokuapp.com/

#ruby #ruby on rails #cookies #polymorphic

Day 30: <3 Javascript, Sinatra, Api's, finally feeling like a real developer

I have been implementing a ton of javascript in both the front-end and the back end. I most enjoy the flexibility of using OO JS. From the structuring, to the naming I prefer the way javascript makes me think while programming.

In order to further my knowledge of javascript and work on the google maps api I began a side project to map micro landmarks. When I first moved to San Francisco I spent the first two weeks walking around the city finding the most awesome places. I found some hills with incredible views, amazing pieces of graffiti and abandoned structures on the beach. I built a mobile first application to map these kind of places.

The biggest challenges I faced was building a persistence layer so the map re populates. In addition, I wanted to write my code as modularly as possible for scalability and refactoring.

A surprising challenge was implementing geolocation. I was able to adjust the scope and timing of the execution of my functions to make it work. I'm attaching the code below that gets my program up and running.

#javascript #sinatra #api

Day 24: The Halfway Point, MVC JavaScript, AJAX

This week I learned backend MVC Vanilla JS. I converted a few of my old ruby apps into MVC JS and also built some entirely new apps that use JS on both the frontend and the backend. I found javascript to be way more beautiful, I loved the way it made me think.

Below is a screen shot of JavaScript Racer! It's your basic browser game. Two people tap keys and the first one to get to the end wins.

I also implemented AJAX into one of my existing sinatra apps. I was beginning to understand frameworks and then along came AJAX. By re-routing the post into an AJAX request I was able to turn a 3 page app into a one page app. Being able to manipulate the routing of a post request blew my mind. I now realize that these frameworks and conventions are just that! Frameworks and conventions. They are not hardened structures and there is a ton of room for programmers to improve upon their functionality.

Below is a shot of my Ajax object that I am using to send requests

#Ajax #javascript #jquery

Day 20: A week of building apps with sinatra

This was the first week of phase2. I built about 5 simple apps this week. The highlights were a craigslist style application that is designed to aid in pet 'renting and adoption'. Sometimes people just want to borrow a dog for a day!

I also built a twiiter clone called 'kitter' that is a platform for cats to post excuses why there were late. For example "I overslept in my nap and missed my other nap". I'm posting an image of landing page.

It's been a very busy week but I still have plenty of energy to have fun with what we are doing here.

The progression here at DevBootcamp is so good that i can't mark a single large step of understand that brought me to this point of learning to put together an app. After being introduced to routes in the controller I was very easily able to implement them and understand what it took to throw together an app. Shortly after learning what a route was I had built a multi-page application with more than one database table. It's all pretty mind blowing

Highlights:

+ finally getting the bcrypt gem working in order to do secure user password login/sign-up/storage.

+ Getting a lot better at reading erros and configuring my computer

+ using sessions and params. Both so cool!

+ realizing that learning all this backend has made me way better at front end.

Things I missed out on this week but want to get done soon:

- Deploy an app to heroku and get the postgres database working (the reason I didn't post links to my apps :)

- go back over all my notes. So much learning to do!

#devbootcamp #computercamp #sinatra

DAY 16: I waited way too long to post.

DevBootcamp is divided into 3 sections. The first is mostly algorithms, the second is application design in sinatra, javascript, css and html, and the third phase is more of that plus rails.

I just wrapped up phase 1. In the past week I have

- designed my own version of active record

- built a preliminary version of Rspec

- Built a command line application that simulates the functionality of the game 'cards against humanity'. We generated the cards by crawling the headings of a popular teen site with the nokogiri gem http://nokogiri.org/ . This made for some pretty funny and dramatic hands.

Today we are beginning phase 2 so I am quite excited to dive into building applications. Over the weekend I brushed up and expanded upon my knowledge of Rspec. I am looking forward to implementing test driven development for my upcoming applications in Rspec.

In addition, we moved into a new much much larger space this week. Here is a shot of our old place, there is now much much more room for activities.

#devbootcamp #rspec #activerecord

Day 8: First application at DevBootcamp

I built my first version of the to do app. I know we will build and rebuild this application multiple times in multiple languages over my career here at DevBootcamp. It keeps track of tasks for the user and indicates if a task has been completed. We implemented MVC architecture for this command line run application. I really enjoyed discussing and learning about best practices for building scalable applications. We modeled our data with two classes, one for individual tasks and one for the list itself. We used a .csv and later a .txt file for our database. Our view was simple, it was just command line run. I found the controller the most interesting. It's the middle ground and we used it to delegate commands to their proper methods as well as parse different data formats in order to keep our model and database in sync. I really enjoyed this intro to MVC architectures and the layout payed off when we wanted to make changes. We were easily able to change our database from a .csv file to a .txt file as well as update functionality.

#MVC #ruby #devbootcamp

Day 5: I solved my first sudoku! EVER!

The sudoku problem seems to be a well known rite of passage. The task is to create a program that can solve a Sudoku puzzle. I knew this would be tough since I had never solved a sudoku puzzle by hand, so the thought of having to write an algorithm to solve one seemed awfully daunting. I began by solving (most) of one by hand so I could learn the nuances of the puzzle. I tried to solve as systematically as possible in order to mimic the patterns of an algorithm. I then moved to the whiteboard and discussed plans of attack with my partner. We used a variety of data structures and used an approach that first target the boxes, then rows and finally columns. We kept our methods as granular as possible to make debugging easier. Big High Five! After a full days work, it felt great to get those passing solutions.

#ruby #devbootcamp #sudoku

Day 4: Steve Klabnik Talk

At the end of the day, Steve Klabnik https://twitter.com/steveklabnik came in and gave us a talk on the history of the ruby language. Not only did I learn an absolute ton about the history of ruby, ruby programming culture but I also learned that this guy is seriously funny.

If there is one thing I could share from his talk its MINSWAN and it stands for Matz Is Nice So We Are Nice. Matz was the creator of the Ruby Language. I have seen programming bring out both the best in myself and in those around me. Steve encouraged new programmers to feel comfortable asking questions. He said, "If computers worked, you wouldn't be programming. And computers are perpetually broken" A few times this week I tried to plug through problems and just ended up banging my head against the proverbial wall. Not only did it hurt, but it soon made me realize that I would have saved a lot of time and frustration by just asking for help.

#ruby #dev bootcamp

Day 3: Prime Number Recursion

After a successful day of solving algorithms with ruby I came up on a tough one, and it was getting late. The task was to return a list of prime factors of a given composite integer. Usually I would have just banged my head against the wall and made a billion experiments until I came up on the correct answer. However, here at DevBootcamp things were different. My friend Charles felt that he had a strong vision for the problem so he went to the white board and began to scribble and rabble on. After struggling to understand his solution I asked for him to walk me through the problem while I wrote out the values of the variables given a particular passed in argument. This made all of the difference for me in the world for me. It was incredible feeling to understand in depth such a complicated solution.

I think this exercise marked a turning point in my ability to comprehend difficult solutions and see them through into code.

#ruby #dev bootcamp

DevBootcamp Days 1 & 2

Well, I am finally here. The first thing that shocked me was how awesome everyone is. I know that "awesome" is an over used word, but in this case, I feel it is entirely justified. I am surrounded by some of the happiest, most energetic and compassionate people I have ever come in contact with.

The structure of this program blows away anything I have ever come in contact with in academia. It is similar to my years in architecture school, but overall I would have to say it is far more effective due to the constant pairing. It not only keeps you on your toes, but you are constantly having Aha! moments when learning from/teach your pair.

My current highlight is tackling some searching algorithms with Ravi. Even though it was getting late, we were excited to learn about linear and binary searching. It was also the first time we explored the speed of our methods. Using the built in benchmark, we saw how much more effective our binary method was than either a linear search or the built in enumerable methods.

This made me realize how important it will be to keep my eye on places that could slow down methods when dealing with larger data sets.

Can't wait for day 3!

#Devbootcamp #ruby

JQuery beginnings

I wanted to add some spice to the Team Images on the TTD site. After researching different hover effects it became clear that I was most enthused by JQuery solutions. I followed the directions to the best of my ability but the syntax was totally foreign. I hopped over to code school and spent some time learning about/building JQuery solutions. I learned to show and hide DOM elements as well as add styling on mouseovers. In addition, I used AJAX to query the server and get new elements to the DOM.

After all of the that I decided to institute a little JQuery of my own. I started small and used JQuery for a simple hover effects that both adds opacity and filters the image to be black and white.

Overall, its pretty simple but exciting to be writing something all new in a language that I have heard so much about.

#jquery

Amazon Web Services & Mobile Responsive

www.TeamThunderDome.com

I want to familiarize myself with Amazon Web Services(AWS) so I decided to host my files for one of my domains there. Setting up a static page there was a little trickier than I expected but certainly a good intro into the demands of more specified hosting platforms.

I also redesigned a previous site to be mobile responsive. Overall, the mobile re-design was a lot of fun and I reconsidered many of my previous design choices in order to be more mobile ready.

#aws #html #css

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