Petr Gazarov

[petrgazarov]

W9D4

Our capstone presentations tomorrow! I'm going to work on styling today. I still have a few features I would like to implement (hey, they are infinite in gmail), but as they say - you are never done with a project. So, I think I'll keep working on it whenever I have time next week. It's been by far the most interesting project I've done in a/A and I have learnt, got better understanding of and tested a myriad of new things. I feel confident about building a website from scratch now.

[petrgazarov]

W9D3

Today I implemented drafts folder and updated sign up form to have more fields and to send ajax request to create the user. In my ComposeEmailBox view, I wrote method saveEmail that got called on user input every 2 seconds and saved the draft to the database. I chose to do it this way because I still want to have saved the draft even if user does a hard reload or navigates away in the browser.

I'm goong to focus on trash and creating custom folders today.

[petrgazarov]

W9D2

After a bit of deliberation, I decided to switch my app back to rails auth. It was good to get experience implementing auth on backbone, but for a clone of gmail, rails auth is preferrable because user is not supposed to get access anywhere before they are signed in. Best part of this switch was debugging (sarcastic) :)

Today I also implemented a few more buttons ("Back" and "Refresh") and enabled replying to emails via a new form. Next up, I'm going to work on styling sign up page and implementing folders and labels.

[petrgazarov]

W9D1

Today I made a guest login, added more seed data, added "sent mail" folder and fixed bug related to ordering of emails in the show thread view. I also fixed existing and added new associations on the Rails side. I decided upon having Contact model send and receive emails, and User model not having any direct relationship to emails. This is so because user may send/receive emails from people that are not users of the app. It felt wasteful to create a user model for contacts that are not even users of the app. In the process, I added current_user_contact method to Rails application controller, that found contact associated with current user's credentials.

[petrgazarov]

W8D5-7

On Friday and over the weekend I implemented Backbone Auth and applied some basic CSS styling to sign in and main pages.

I also got some good practice writing custom ajax requests. One of the challenges was the swapping view on the sign in. First the user is prompted for the username and then, if such credential exists, the view swaps and the user is asked for the password. If it doesn't, the view is not swapped and a message is displayed. I wrote a custom controller action "fetch" in api/sessions_controller which looked up the username in database and returned it if there was a match. If not, it returned an empty json.

Another challenge was deciding on overall app design. Before, when I had rails view for sign in page, my main backbone views were initialized on app's start and backbone router only swapped the email show container (displayed a list of email, an email thread show, etc). Now that sign in was a backbone view, that had to change. I opted to constrain the router to only initialize the main backbone views if the user is signed in. Otherwise, it rendered the sign in view. By using callbacks and listeners, I had the app switch seamlessly back and forth based on the current sign in status.

[petrgazarov]

W8D4

Today I continued working on my Backbone Views, enabling display of email thread. Showing all related messages was tricky, I used recursion both on backend and front end to find all children messages, which includes direct replies as well as replies to replies. In the end, when a user clicks on email, the whole thread is shown.

[petrgazarov]

W8D3

Today I added basic layout CSS to the mail homepage and then worked on showing the email list. That required creating Contact Model on the client side (to hold the sender's information) and adding new actions to EmailsController. Right now, I have a separate action for inbox, sent, starred and drafts email folders, so that the entire mail doesn't get loaded up when you see just the inbox. I may change that later to fetching the latest N emails (both sent and received) right away and getting older ones when users requests them. Alternatively, another design I'm considering is fetching latest email threads (rather then emails) so that a full thread is fetched when it contains a recent message.

So far, the project has been the hardest thing I've done in a/A but also the best learning experience. Tuesday next week will be peer review and I hope to finish all basic features before then.

[petrgazarov]

W8D2 Capstone

It was very exciting to take first steps in my project today. I learnt a lot of new things and have seen a few errors I haven't seen before. One of the errors was complaining about "type" being a reserved word in SQL, so you cannot have that column name. Another one was when I forgot to use "inverse of" in my Rails association, and the model would not save correctly.

By the end of the day I built three Rails models (Email, EmailAddressee and Contact) and enabled email message to be saved from a form. On the client side, I laid out composite views on the main page and made the compose form appear after button click.

I also worked on my git commits being well-timed and messages being clear. This is important also because it helps me think ahead and organize my day.

[petrgazarov]

W8D1 Finishing Trello Clone

Today we continued working on our Trelllo Clone. I did a lot of CSS work, working on making the app similar to its original. Lesson: CSS takes a lot of time!

I also used JQuery ui/sortable to drag list items and change their order, which was way cool. I didn't get to persisting their new order in the database though.

I had setup a lot of "Composite" backbone views in the app and I learnt a lot by debugging them. In particular, I learnt good practices on how not to have wasteful renders, fetches and zombie views when you deal with so nested views.

Today we start on Capstone projects. The day has come!

[petrgazarov]

W7D5-7

Friday we started building Trello Clone, a "warm up" before the final project. It was a good and much needed backbone practice before the assessment. The weekend was busy but exciting: I got to layout the plan for the Final project (which is Gmail Clone for me), and prepare the wireframes and db schema. I also generated the skeleton and pushed to heroku. All and all, the clone will take two weeks to build and will be the culmination of our experience at a/A. Can't wait until tomorrow when we are scheduled to start.

[petrgazarov]

W7D4 Backbone NewsReader App

Today was our last "official" pair day.

We built the client side of a simple NewsReader App, writing multiple views, a router, templates, models and collections. In the remaining class time after we finished the main part of the project, we implemented user auth and ended up using Rails for that.

It was interesting to think of when is best to implement a feature in backbone versus Rails and the other way around. In case of user auth, it made sense to use Rails because we wanted to require sign in for access to any page of the website. Alternatively, if a website has content available to anyone, and just adds extra features with a sign in (Yelp, for example), then I would imagine it's better to implement user auth in Backnone.

Tomorrow is Solo and next week we're starting our final projects-clones. I chose Gmail and am very excited to start.

[petrgazarov]

W7D3 Backbone App from Scratch

Today we got a whole lot more practice on Backbone, writing a simple journal app from ground up. I'm starting to get comfortable using Backbone. I actually like it a lot.

Among things learnt are:

How to read and debug errors arising from my Backbone code.

write and use _swapView(newView) method and to remove old views and prevents "zombie views".

when we call save() method on a model, we need to be mindful of the attributes format. save() calls toJSON on attributes under the hood, which makes only a shallow copy of its attributes and puts it in a string.

different listen events ("add", "change", "sync", "reset", "remove") and when to use which to get the needed result.

Avoid rendering or fetching more then necessary. It is expensive and slows the program.

[petrgazarov]

W7D2 Backbone Views and Routers

We continued to work on our Pokedex backbone app today, focusing on Views and Router.

Among things learnt are:

How to organize the client side MVC using backbone.

Backbone Views are different type from Rails Views. Learnt to use EJS templates to hold content that would be evaluated to html.

First argument of Backbone method save() is a hash of attributes to be updated ( ! ). Intuitevely I kept mistaking for the hash with the success callback (which comes second!).

Any action that possibly goes to the database ( like fetch() and save() ) is asynchronous. Meaning that javascript won't wait until it completes and will keep running the code below.

ListenTo(). Love this method. It takes care of the above problem by listening to the events' completion and then firing the callback.

ListenTo() also binds this for us automatically. When we call remove() on a view, it stops listening to the events, preventing "zombie views" (views that never get garbage collected).

[petrgazarov]

W7D1 Backbone Models & Collections

Welcome to Backbone!

We built a Pokedex App using Backbone to send Ajax requests to dynamically update content on the page. Backbone is very interesting to learn. Today we will continue on our app and will focus on Views and Routers.

[petrgazarov]

W6D5 AJAX

Friday we built AJAX Twitter. Was a lot of fun to learn to use AJAX requests in order to not have to load up the entire page every time a hit to the database is needed. There was also a Javascript assessment Friday, which was quite stressful, in part because we didn't have the weekend to prepare as usual, but in the end I passed all specs and finished early.

Weekend was full of yet another new material - Backbone. We will be focusing on Backbone this entire week, so there was a lot of readings and over 4 hours of video to complete. I'm very excited that in just one week we'll be starting our Capstone projects. It feels like everything we've learnt starts to wrap up in one whole.

[petrgazarov]

W6D4 JQuery Plugins

Among things learnt Thursday are "transionend" event listeners, JQuery method .eq() and more importantly, how to use what we learnt yesterday to make more kinds of dynamic user-friendly pages. We also got a good amount of css practice, building 3 dynamic plugins from scratch. Tomorrow we will learnt yet something new: AJAX. I'm excited to learn AJAX in the context of JQuery and Rails.

[petrgazarov]

JQuery W6D3

Today we rewrote Tic Tac Toe and Towers of Hanoi to work in the browser using CSS styling and JQuery. It was very gratifying to be able to play the games in the browser and I don't know know if console will ever be the same after that!

I like JQuery a lot. It makes possible to load the page once and then have content change dynamically, without any additional requests. I learnt about the DOM and the importance (besides the obvious convenience) to work with JQuery objects and not DOM objects, because DOM methods may vary among different browsers. In our games, we used event handlers for click events, taking advantage of asynchronous nature of Javasript.

In Towers of Hanoi, we needed a way to wait for the second click and only then play the turn. We accomplished that by nesting an event handler inside of an event handler. I learnt that I needed to "turn off" the first handler and only then create a new handler, which in turn would turn itself off and reset back to the first handler once it received the second click. It was very interesting to work with JQuery and learnt about all this logic.

Tomorrow we will focus on JQuery plugins and on Friday we have an assessment that will consist of easy to intermediate Javascript problems, including some recursion and callbacks.