Ruby on Wheels

@rubyonwheels-blog

Bikes, blocks, and procs.

43 posts

w9d4

Whoo. Last full day before our final project presentations. I was able to clean up a lot of stuff, but still certainly have far to go! OAuth was a lot easier than I thought it would be, literally it took a simple migration on the users table and about 50 lines of code to go form just regular auth to auth and oauth.

I’m really happy about how easy it is to read the docs for the API’s that I’ve been able to use so far. I was worried for a bit that the docs would be just as obtuse as some of the gems that I have been using, but it has been all good.

w9d2

Today we continued on our final projects. I’m working on putting Google Maps markers on the map for each of the restaurants in my Yelp clone. I think that my favorite thing about doing these projects is being able to figure stuff out from reading documentation. Google Maps is exceptionally well documented (well, it’s Google), but it doesn’t really like to play nicely with Backbone. I’ll get it done though!

w9d1

I’m back! Had to miss two days to get some medical care after a bike accident, but I’m really excited to get back to making my Yelp clone.

I worked on it a lot during the weekend and managed to push everything to Backbone during that time (except for user auth in Backbone, which is a bonus that I’d realllly love to implement if I have time).

Today, I spent about 2 hours on CSS and the rest on adding images to users and restaurants. It’s starting to look really good, with a default image if the new user or restaurant isn’t created with an accompanying image.

I also managed to get Google Maps to render on my index page! Granted, it’s not as clean as I’d like so I’ll be working on that tomorrow, but just getting a map on there in a pure Backbone way was harder than I thought it would be.

w8d3

Our second day of final projects went well. I was able to move pretty much everything into Backbone. I skipped making the error callbacks while making put requests, but I figure that since I’ve budgeted two days to do Backbone, I’ll do that tomorrow. Other than that, it looks alright! My strategy right now is to do the simplest rendition of my app, and then add interesting functionality later. It’s working out pretty well, since I’ve been traveling at a good pace.

w8d2

Today was our first day of final projects. I’m pretty proud of what I’ve made so far, which was all in Rails. I tried to prioritize things that would enhance the value of the final product, so I worked on the MVC structure, authentication, and spent about an hour on styling at the end to make it look palatable. Then, we pushed up to Heroku. I had already used Heroku before, so it was pretty easy. I also bought welp.space, a great domain name.

In the meantime, check out the site in progress at:

https://welp-welp.herokuapp.com/

w8d1

It’s week 8?!?!?!?! Today was our first experience using JQuery UI. I made sure to try to build the draggable functionality without referencing the curriculum or asking a TA because that’ll be much more representative of what we’ll be doing in real life when dealing with unfamiliar plugins. I was successful, which was good, but decided to forego adding the ability for the dragged items to save to the database in order to work on styling. I’m notoriously bad at styling, see, and it wound up being a good experience working with positioning and different types of elements to make the site look more like Trello.

w7d5

Today we worked on a warm-up project before our final projects, a Trello clone. I wound up getting pretty far! It was our first time using Bootstrap. Since we had spent so much time working on pure CSS, Bootstrap came really easily to me. I don’t think I’ll use Bootstrap for more than just small projects that need to look good fast, though. It’s nice, but by the time you’re getting to the point that you want to customize it, you might as well have just written your own CSS.

w7d4

Today was our last day of pair programming :(. We continued with Backbone, building another app from scratch and using a special tool that a/A had built. It really helped to solidify what we’ve been learning. Tomorrow we’re doing a Trello clone, so that’s exciting!

w7d3

Moar Backbone today. We did a lot of refactoring of what we did yesterday the proper Backbone way through making a blog app. No more skeleton file training wheels, we did pretty much everything ourselves. I was able to review alot of the curriculum tonight, hopefully that will prepare for tomorrow.

w7d2

Today we did the router and views in Backbone, which was really interesting! Backbone, to me, is an interesting framework because it’s the first front end framework that we have studied. Granted, we’re pretty early into our front-end framework curriculum, but they seem interesting to me because they try to bring order to the browser and client experience, which seem inherently messy due to their use of HTML, CSS, and Javascript pretty much in exclusivity. My partner and I wound up finishing today’s project early and it seemed like we both got a pretty good hang of writing views and routes, so that’s good. Now it’s time to think of a good final project.

w6d5

Today was action packed. In the morning, we took the JavaScript exam which, unsurprisingly, tested us on our ability to make our own inheritance and bind methods. After that, we went back to Rails (although mostly writing JavaScript) to learn about AJAX, Underscore.js, and learning how to inject new HTML on a page without having to refresh. It was a really good activity, and I’m excited to start Backbone.js tomorrow!

w6d4

Today we worked on making our own jQuery plugins, which was super interesting because it is really applicable to what we’ll be doing in our final projects and at our future jobs. I definitely saw a lot of today’s responsive design in the projects we worked on today. Tomorrow, we’ll be reuniting with an old friend, Rails. Can’t wait for that.

w6d3

I can’t believe that we’re already more than halfway through week 6. Anyway!! Today we worked on Snake and Towers of Hanoi, animated in the browser. Our Towers of Hanoi is pretty adorable, since we were able to code the little spools that the game was originally played on. I’m really starting to like JavaScript as I learn more about how powerful it is and get used to the syntax.

w6d2

In preparation for working on JQuery today, we did a fun(?) CSS day. I’m sure that CSS will become fun once we learn the idiosyncrasies of each tag and attribute, but for now it’s like trying to paint something beautiful with a brush that has seemingly arbitrary rules for what it puts on the page. I’m excited to work on JQuery tomorrow though, since it means that we’ll be able to make pretty things on the browser!!

w6d1

Today was so much fun! Emmanuel and I always have a blast, but we worked on an Asteroids clone today. Finally -- I can show off something to my friends that works on the web and isn’t a bunch of pages from the 90′s. Thank goodness for the explicit instructions -- I think I would definitely have had more trouble with the project without them. We got pretty far, but I finished the project later that night and it looks pretty good! You can find it here.

w5d5

More jawas! We spent today doing callbacks to work with JavaScript being asynchronous. The way that helped me understand it was thinking about making sure that everything that I wanted to do after requesting input from the user was in the callback. JavaScript certainly involves thinking in a different way than Ruby -- it’s nice to be back in the realm of mind-bending material since I know it’s a great way to grow as a programmer, but I can’t say that I don’t miss the Porsche-like world of Ruby.

w5d4

Today we started JavaScript! The transition was not as bad as I thought it would be, so that’s a relief. It’s my first new language outside of Ruby so I didn’t know what to expect, but a lot of the logic is very similar. It’s kind of cool to see how languages make you think differently -- the way that a for loop makes so much more sense in JavaScript for a particular problem, whereas the same problem in Ruby wouldn’t make sense with for loops. I’m excited to see how this translates into beautiful front ends, which we should be doing soon!

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