#sixth cents

[stevearagon]

a/A W9D5 - Sixth Cents Presentation Day

The moment we (people in my cohort and I) have all been waiting for: Final Project Presentations. We spent most of the morning ensuring that our web apps didn't have any remaining bugs that would haunt our click-through/presentation of our projects.

I had a few bugs with working with some of my seed data (seed data is fake information you use to populate your site). I worked on that until maybe 30-45 mins before presentation time.

Earlier in the morning, I also tried to put in an element(for me it was spinner) that would inform the user that the page was currently loading. I looked into using the spin.js plugin. I had no trouble starting the spinner, but stopping it at the right time was a problem. Most people would probably stop their spinner after their AJAX requests were done. For me at least on the landing page, I needed the spinner to go until my budget charts were generated. Generating the charts took the longest amount of time. I couldn't figure out what event I would use to stop the spinner on. I will look into this more.

There are a few things I will probably try to work on the next few days to add. Number one is pagination.

P.S. presentation went well. I noticed one bug show up that was due to incorrect seed data. I had an expense that wasn't a negative amount which messed with one of the budget charts.

[stevearagon]

a/A W9D4 - Sixth Cents Day 11 (Final Day)

So I pretty much completed Sixth Cents, a site clone of Mint.com. (link here). I’ll probably work more on it after we present them tomorrow, but this is the final product for class.

Today I finished a few of the non-core features of the app that were required. These were omniauth which allows a user to log in/sign up using another website's authentication. I used Twitter for mine. You can do multiple ones if you’d like, but I’ll save that for another day.

The other feature was adding the ability for users to upload files using the Paperclip gem and Amazon S3. The only file I needed users to upload was an avatar which is shown on the top left side, in a very small square. I guess if I wanted to allow users to upload a spreadsheet of transactions, I could use this file uploading feature of the app.

I didn’t add other new features because I want everything to work during our presentations tomorrow. I will probably do some more styling and fix small bugs before we show off our apps tomorrow afternoon.

[stevearagon]

a/A W9D3 - Sixth Cents Day 10

We're almost at the end of the 11 day window we were given to complete our clone of a popular site. I have been working hard on styling and making some gauges to track a user's budgets. I think my styling looks ok so far. Is it me or does styling a page take way longer than you think? I have to complete a few more things on the final day tomorrow. They will probably(hopefully) be twitter omniauth, pagination, and file hosting. Definitely a lot of stuff for a day.

[stevearagon]

a/A W9D2- Sixth Cents  Day 8

At the sorta halfway point of our projects, we had two of our classmates review our sites. I haven't really styled much of my page, as I focused on the functionality, and that was where I was docked points from my peers.Overall, I think I did ok.

For the rest of the day I worked on two things: Backbone auth and styling my page. Backbone auth took a lot less time that I thought. Styling one page takes a lot more time than I thought. It seems I will be styling until we present our projects Friday morning, and maybe I will put in one more piece of functionality.

[stevearagon]

a/A W9D1 - Sixth Cents Day 5-7

The beginning and end of making an app seem the hardest. The best thing I learned so far in the process is being discplined in naming everything correctly, ordering things properly and following your plan. As I fix some bugs and style, It probably takes me a little bit longer to find certain things. If I properly tagged my css file or stayed very consistent in class naming for my elements, things would be a bit easier.

I finished most of the basic functionality but had plan on completing displaying trends (which I partly have), searching through transactions (I have basic filters for transactions) and emailing alerts on accounts (I am still thinking about what the best way to do alerts is, but I probably just need to use whatever way I can think of right now).

We will have our current projects, no matter what state, reviewed by our peers tomorrow. f u n

[stevearagon]

a/A W8D5 - Sixth Cents Day 4

I had an issue with pushing my app up to Heroku today. Long story short, don’t rake assets:precompile. This will create a static assets folder that will be uploaded to heroku. Changes to your assets will not be reflected in your next push going forward. I ended up doing this while trying to troubleshoot another problem.

Other than that whole thing, the day went by smoothly. I completed the budgets page (not styled yet like most of my site) where you can create budgets and view a list of your budgets. I ran into one problem with how I initially set up my budgets.

On Mint.com, you create a budget. Then every month going forward will have this monthly budget. Your monthly budgets are then static for the month after you complete it. So, I ended up thinking that I would need two types of budgets. One table of budget instructions and one of recorded budgets. The budget instructions are what the user enters. This will always be avaiable for users to edit. The recorded budgets table will be created at the close of every month from the available budget instructions.

I still have a lot more work to do, but I seem to be getting somewhere.

[stevearagon]

a/A W8D4 - Sixth Cents Day 3

I am continuing to build my Mint.com clone today. So far, I have built out Backbone models & collections for bank accounts, transactions and budgets. I think I have a couple more to build: Alerts & Bills (possibly goals).

There isn't much on the best practices in Backbone, so I never feel 100% confident on how I am implementing things. I built out some filter links to view a user’s transactions, but I am doing it in a roundabout way. If you want to see all transactions, you pull all the user’s transactions from the database at one time. If you look at an account’s transactions, another sql query is fired that pulls the association of transactions on an account. I will try and make the account transactions page just filter from the initial pull of all transactions. Good luck to me.

[stevearagon]

a/A W8D3 - Sixth Cents Day Two

Day two of a two week project. I feel the beginning of these types of projects is the toughest. Oh wait, this is the first time I am doing somehting like this.

As I mentioned yesterday, I am making Sixth Cents which is a clone of mint.com. I planned on completing the back end for making transactions which belong to accounts (these accounts are your accounts at a bank i.e. your checking account at Bank of America).

After today, users now have the ability to manually enter accounts and transactions. You can view your accounts on the landing page and then click on an account to see the transactions by account. The most difficult thing was making sure I pulled the right data and had access to it at the right time to display on the page. Also, I ran into some async issues, but I feel a lot better about the topic after trouble shooting it today. Well, on to the next day.