Makersquare

Our final project for MakerSquare: an app for booking flights to Mars. Whimsical? Absolutely. Ahead of its time? Slightly. Completely ridiculous? Only if you’ve forgotten how to dream. [goto](http://marsattracts.com)

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. ...

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. ...

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 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. ...

Day 27 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Analog morning: we got a quick lesson on working with clients [read: ask good questions] & how to translate their ideas into specs, which we can use to determine what sort of product to build and how to build it. Then, Casey put on a ten-gallon hat and turned into Mr. Gus Chiggins, Idea Man. Mr. Chiggins asked us to build a web app he dubbed “Weightable” which will allow users to sign up, set weight goals, and start tracking their weight daily. Their friends can see their progress and give them encouragement along the way. We then worked in groups to put together the client spec and clarify what he said he wanted. ...

Day 26 of MakerSquare. Started the day with an update from the career services duo. We got some pointers on how to get our online selves together. We were also reminded that even though we’re here at MKS to eventually get jobs in development, we need to learn to be better developers first. Moral of the story: code. Front-end: using presenters in riot.js to perform actions for our webpage, all illustrated with incredibly un-fierce puppies. We did a lot of reading code and practiced verbalizing what was going on with it. ...

Day 25 at MakerSquare. Front-end: started mucking around with MVP - model, views, presenters - with our host of JS libraries. Conceptually, it seems similar to what we’ve seen in Rails. I think the next step to take will be getting a better understanding of the file structure and where to store what code. Back-end: sending emails with Rails Action Mailer. It was interesting to see how this system used the MCV style of Rails to incorporate with the rest of the application. Also, there’s something really awesome about reaching into the world from one of our applications and interacting with some aspect of it. ...