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W9D5

Last Capstone Day. So here we are at the end of the project. I have to make some fake data and do a lot of css/and fancying up, but I have a bunch of working, dynamic, database calling components that look decent. Not as many as I would have liked though. Lots to do for the jobs section for sure. And maybe I'll be able to get some d3.js incorporated.

W9D3

Capstone Week 2. Well, we're getting to even crunchier crunch time. It's interesting how the pressure to do well on this capstone is almost entirely self-imposed. No one is telling us that we need to have this done and with good quality. I don't even think that the pressure is coming from the urge to make a good impression on employers. I feel like with the character of the folks in the program, it's more about wanting to build using the tools we have learned. I want to show myself that I can make something interesting/potentially useful, even in a small sense or on a small scale. It's also the first time, really that we haven't been following guides on how to proceed, so that has been very different from all of our prior work. It has resulted in me learning a few things about tools that we worked with in the past, simply because I have been playing around with them to try to get them to suit my needs. I feel that, if I were a more competent programmer at the beginning of the program, that I would have been able to do more of that during the course of the course. That though, is entirely the point! Start from whatever skill level and end up a good programmer. If I had started as a great programmer from the beginning, I would not have needed to do this, eh? Ok, back to project. Forms!

#w9d4 #appacademy #reflection

W8D3

No time. Lots to do.

W9d1

Capstone week 2. Datejs. That's all I'll say. HTML and is and ruby have trouble agreeing on formats. It's causing me no end of headaches. That and react router. Some things are working though, but not enough yet. I need to figure out how I am going to simulate bank data.

W8D5,6,7

End of Capstone Week 1. So marks the end of the most hectic week I've had in quite some time. Lots of coding, lots of bug finding. Lots of relearning concepts we learned during the course of the course (ha.) And studying for the CSS assessment coming up Monday. Yoinks. I feel like maybe I am complicating a lot of my React flux cyle behaviors to acheive the effects I want. Regardless, the app has functional components. It has a fancy inline form that only appears when you click on a particular data entry, and it looks REEally ugly. Some parts look ok, but I have a modal just stuck in the front of one of the pages and all sorts of stuff. I also feel like I should be using jQuery more for my dynamic behaviors, but I got locked into this idea of using flux for almost everything. I don't know if I will get to all the fun stuff I had planned for the project, but I will have something that does something at least, which I was not sure of on Thursday considering how long certain components were taking me to build. No WILoD because I need to go to sleep. Excelsior!

W8D5

_Capstooone!_ So the project proceeds. I have something that actually looks like a part of mint, through the functionality is limited. I have been working on react component skeletons for all of the parts of the site and now it's time to build the flux capacitor. Actually it's the flux cycle, but same difference. And some react routing, which will be unfamiliarish. That's all, back to work.

W8D3

Capstone Project Day 2. So it was like this. I fell into the same trap that I fell into two days ago with the BenchBnB project. I accidentally left off the .jsx suffix from a react component and I was getting an error that I couldn't figure out. The frustrating thing wasn't the bug. It was the fact that I saw this bug two days ago and I knew that I had seen it before and yet I couldn't remember the solution! Very frustrating. I got behind on my self set schedule today, but I also built a bunch of stuff that I had been planning to work on as part of phase 2 (Stores for models) simply because I needed it to test some things, and I could have built some non-fluxxy-Stores to test, but if one is going through all the trouble of building a store in the first place, why not build a flux store and start setting up all of that scaffolding that one will need later? I also styled one of my nesting components so that it looks nice. It's dynamic too, which is cool. I have been avoiding building a form component for making new accounts, mainly because it's going to be a bear, especially since I have to find alternate functionality to what Mint actually uses (I can't very well hook up the site to an actual bank). But now it's time to sleep and work more tomorrow!

WILoD

I need to remember bugs/mistakes that I make once, so I don't make them again. Maybe make a common bug list? Or a common protocol.

I like CSS styling. I am worried that I am making too many classes and that it's going to be muddled. But then I look at actual sites...

I don't know at this point how much functionality I'll be able to get into this thing, but I will be working crazy hard to get everything working.

I built some nice dynamic component action. Fluxxy!

I need to get some t-shirts made that say 'hey fluxxy!'

I need to make a t-shirt with a lot of 'yup's on it.

ok, sleep.

W8D2

Capstone Day 1. The Capstone projects are underway! Everyone was hard at work making cool stuff. I was hard at work making user auth work and getting two of my three(four?) major models built up. I completed my self-set checklist for the day, so that's good, but this is the basic rote stuff. Nothing crazy going on just yet. Even so, it was all about racking the brain to remember the details of the things we learned a few weeks ago. Dredging it up from underneath all of that React/JS/JSX/ReactRouter that we've been studying and working with for the past week. Tomorrow will be more accessable to memory, I think. I spent the Metro North train ride working on CSS styling of my login page, trying to get it to look similar to the mint page. I think I did well. I even styled the flash errors so that they aren't just a text pop at the top of the page. More tomorrow.

WILoD

I actually remember most of user auth without prompting!

I am confused by json builder

I need to make sure to get sleep, or this all will turn out poorly.

I am going to sleep right now. Cheers!

W8D1

Last day of regular curriculum. It was the end of our two day project incorporating rails and react. Sort of a mini final project. I got a lot done, and I feel like I learned a lot about the bug finding process, which I think will benefit me most of all. Now comes the capstone project. I am making a Mint clone, and my proposal is apparently "ambitious". The good thing is that it is planned in chunks, so that if there is not enough time for a chunk, I can focus on the prior sections and still have a good app.

W7D5

_React curriculum_. No time to talk. Capstone project proposal. I will say this though, do the wireframe a and the schema first. It helped me solidify what the rest of the project would be focused on.

W7D4

_React Curriculum_. Today was our last pairing day. Sad...but we got introduced to React router, so fun! It's basically React and JSX tied to view routing. It takes over a portion of what rails does for when one has nested components and allows the front end to take over the page view so that you never actually navigate away from your starting page, just what is on the page changes. Interesting, and clear to understand. ###WILoD 1. I made a pokemen index 2. With cute cat pictures 3. And stats!

W7D3

React Curriculum Day 3. So today was Flux, which is not really a library, but rather a design pattern for controlling data flow. Apparently the folks at Facebook were not OK with the standard Model View Controller way of doing things because everything got REEally complicated when there were too many modules talking to each other without any real sense of order. So Flux aims to solve that by making the data flow like a big loop, rather than back and forth. Here's the thing though. If you are trying to understand it, and set up your app to abide by it's guidelines, the flow of passed functions does NOT go in the same direction as the data. If you try to think otherwise, it can get confusing. We made a flux organ, which is like a regular organ, except your computer keyboard plays the keys and on screen, it looks nothing like a real organ. Though we did make the keys change color when your pressed a keyboard key(CSS/React for the win!).

WILoD

Computers can make sounds that you can control!

Computers can make ear-splitting sounds!

Reset your website to stop the ear-splitting sounds!

We made an app that follows keyboard events, cool!

React router tomorrow. I don't understand it.

W7d2

_React day 2_. This was fun and understandable, _and_ we finished all of the main project. React makes sense, and the asynchronous callbacks were not onerous this time. Just calls for data from one source. Tomorrow Flux.

W7D1

React Curriculum Day 1 Oh javascript, we barely knew you! Oh, wait, React is javascript with fancy features added on. A 'library' is how it was described to us. Basically, it optimizes the rendering of the DOM through jiggerypokery while still appearing to operate as normal. We make some widgets that wook advantage of that, and got stuck dealing with the vagaries of asynchronous callbacks and weather APIs. We spent more than 30 minutes trying to figure out why we were getting errors from an open source weather website when we were making requests. It turned out that we needed to sign up to receive a key. This info was buried in the small print at the bottom of the page...Other hijinks ensued, but when we finally got the stumbles out of the way, we were actually moving at a fairly reasonable clip. Maybe React is right for me! (We'll see.)

#w7d1 #appacademy #react #javascript #asynchronous #api

W6d5,6,7

Last Day of Javascript Curriculum. Although it's not really the last day. We are starting into React tomorrow and that is a permutation of base javascript, just like jQuery is a permutation. JSX looks interesting to me from the readings. It's a way to express the DOM elements that one wants React to create in it's virtual DOM, and it is structured to look a lot like HTML and thus be easier to write in than the native(original?) React syntax. The whole endeavor looks to be fun, and maybe not as hard to pick up as js itself? We shall see.

WILoD

jQuery can make HTML elements on the fly!

AJAX is fun and useful for realtime!

Raking one's lawn takes a long time, even with a blower.

Tangents are good for the soul.

My typing is regressing. I need to practice more.

W6d4

My one solo solo day was today(everyone has a day where they are the only one soloing). We were working on jQuery plugins and I got through two of the three main projects. I am still shaky on the setup for making jQuery work on the browser, what headers and what boilerplate needs to go down, but I feel confident with the main aspects of it, event listeners and whatnot. __however__, I feel like we are only scratching the surface of all the stuff that is available and I wonder where one gets the time to delve more deeply? Next assessment is tomorrow, and I think I’m prepared, but as with my 2nd and 3rd assessments I know that some randomness or blind spot of knowledge could mess it all up. We’ll see. I am worried that we will have to reconstruct the #apply method, because I tried to do that tonight, and I couldn’t. I don’t know how to take and array of arguments and turn it into a list of arguments, which is the only way I can think of recreating the functionality of #apply. We shall see.

###WILoD 1. I learned how to make objects on screen disappear gracefully. 2. I learned how to watch for transition end events. 3. I learned how to make jQuery code apply automatically to specific tags on the page.

W6d3

*Javascript day 5.* Fun with jQuery! Nothing much to report. We made jQuery web interfaces for Towers of Hanoi and Tic Tac Toe and started working on a version of Snake. Playing with the control of HTML classes with event handlers was interesting. ###WILoD 1. I learned how to incorporate click handlers into a website. 2. I learned about double rotation css. 3. I learned that I need to drill more for the assessment.

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