On Friday we had our second 'wax-on-wax-off' session, in which we're given four forty minute rounds to get as far as possible on a project with a different partner each time. The first time we did this, our assignment was tic-tac-toe, and at least for me, I was too much of a novice to get very far into the app (although I did learn a lot about testing). This time around, however, I managed to build an entire functioning todo web app two out of four rounds. Oh the difference a few weeks makes!
During our debrief, it seemed like people still had a lot of questions about how to get this app working. I felt like I'd developed a really good approach to putting it together that lent itself to an understanding of what was actually going on: I used Rails' built in error messaging to essentially tell me what it needed me to do next (someone coined this 'error driven development'). So I offered to lead a 'breakout' session on my approach.
The video above is a 50 minute screencast of the presentation I gave to 25 or so fellow boots. The actual act of screencasting slowed down the computer quite a bit, so apologies for the long delays. I also started with a disclaimer that's worth repeating here: while I understand how all of my code functions, the best explanation I have for a lot of the actual implementation on the back end is still "magic". But that's changing slowly but surely. As always, I'm open to feedback! Enjoy!