Blogs

Day 35 of MakerSquare. Morning: lesson on node.js and gelato. We got a quick and dirty introduction to node, its asynchronicity, and the Express.js framework. In the span of the class, we Installed node.js and npm, the Node package manager Registered API keys with Facebook and Twitter Ran our first node.js server Ate homemade gelato - cookie dough flavor! Poked around the Jade page renderer Ran a node.js server to collect our Twitter stream Posted through the server to Facebook when “JavaScript” was mentioned in said Twitter stream Played Bomberman, as built with node.js Built a chat server Whew. ...

Day 34 of MakerSquare. Morning was perhaps our last lesson on vanilla JavaScript. We learned about prototypes and the .call method. Unique about our preparation was that Gilbert had recorded a version of the lesson as a video for us to watch the night before. I felt that viewing the video and then sleeping really primed my brain for maximum absorption. Moral of the story? Take more naps. Spent more time this afternoon on getting Mars Attracts to a solid place with the Rails portion. We’re growing our databases and are not without pains. But we hammer down the errors as they pop up and keep on developin’.

Day 33 of MakerSquare. Morning lesson was on algorithms and using Big O notation to note how long they should take to run. The basis for the lesson came from a co-founder’s conversation with a Google recruiter and her suggestions for what we should know for technical interviews. I enjoyed the lesson because ti was stretching a different, but parallel, part of the brain. Afternoon was project work. We worked on figuring out where our hackathon project had holes and how to patch them. I added dropdown menus that populate from the database. It works for now, but it looks like we’ll be restructuring our models & it probably won’t work tomorrow. Probably means it’s time to start writing tests. ...

TL;DR If you are new to the asset pipeline in rails, using custom fonts can be a bit confusing. This is how I recommend getting started: add fonts… [goto](http://aokolish.me/blog/2011/12/24/at-font-face-with-the-asset-pipeline/)

Day 32 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Shout out to everyone else who wore a tie, especially the ladies who rocked them with dresses and blouses. Keeping it classy. Front-end: Adding ZURB Foundation to a Rails app and using Sass to write markup. In the evening, I found a blog post detailing how to incorporate custom fonts in Rails, which I’ll link later. Once again, going through Foundation, I admire the speed and ease with which I can get something looking decent, especially next to what I made before I started at MakerSquare. Not that the older stuff was bad, but writing code by hand takes a lot longer. ...

timoarnall: mostlysignssomeportents: Try as I might, I can’t shake the feeling that 2014 is the year we lose the Web. The W3C push for DRM in all browsers is going to ensure that all interfaces built in HTML5 (which will be pretty much everything) will be opaque to users, and it will be illegal to report on security flaws in them… It’s basically all being driven by Netflix. Everyone in the browser world is convinced that not supporting Netflix will lead to total marginalization, and Netflix demands that computers be designed to keep secrets from, and disobey, their owners (so that you can’t save streams to disk in the clear).We are Huxleying ourselves into the full Orwell. ...

Day 30 of MakerSquare. Front-end: We covered a couple of topics today. First, we worked with a weather API to pull a JSON object using AJAX within a JavaScript tag. APIs are powerful tools, but as we saw earlier in the program when GitHub changed theirs, too fragile. Maybe APIs need a versioning system and/or a way to allow developers to test their code against updated APIs to ensure the new release doesn’t break stuff. ...

Day 29 of MakerSquare. Front-end: more jQuery and then digging into Presenters for riot.js. We continued to build our app that allows for posting and commenting on pictures of animals. Our directive today was to study changes in the code and then add a feature to tally the total “likes” on comments for a specific picture. Back-end: Helpers of all sorts in Rails. Partials for the views and helper methods to take “the business logic” out of the views and into model helpers. Glad I completed the Hartl tutorial over the break because: seeing things a second time helps with learning, and I have a new appreciation for Haml, which we used today.

Day 28 of MakerSquare. The day started with a rundown of the schedule and structure of the next week and an impromptu MakerStory from Osei, our new instructor. He previously did a seminar for us on debugging JavaScript in the browser console & was really energetic about it. So, looking forward to seeing what else he has in store for us. Front-end: Lordy, my JavaScript got rusty over the break. Luckily, we had some WD-40 in the form of another review before learning more about the presenters in riot.js. The title of this post came from Gilbert, as he questioned us on how functions are called & the dreamspace they manifest. ...

When we first started writing tests, I developed a sort of existential test crisis: How can I ever know if my tests are right if I’m the one writing them? Is there a way to test my tests? & if so, do I need to test the tests that test my tests? Thankfully, I found my answers in this book. Reading “Everyday Rails: Testing with RSpec” by Aaron Sumner.