Makersquare

Day 24 of MakerSquare. Front-end: closure in JavaScript will, ironically, open many doors and even more questions. More concept review to really nail down the basics of JavaScript. The language is so patchy and quirky that it’d be easy to disparage it for those properties [guilty!]. But, really, it’s probably a matter of becoming more familiar with its strengths and peculiarities. At this point, there’s only one course of action and it involves finally getting a library card. ...

Day 23 of MakerSquare. The day started with two short presentations from possible clients for our final project. Will from Million Mile Month and RC from Shop141. What was interesting about both of these projects is that they’re both focused on improving lives. The code for these projects wouldn’t just be about getting more users or for another social network hoping to topple Facebook [which will happen one day, but not today], but to make tangible differences in people’s day-to-day lives, differences that can have many positive consequences down the road. I’m looking forward to what comes out of these projects. ...

Day 22 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Project/catch up day. In addition to working more with riot.js, I built a video playlist manager in Javascript. It’s similar in style and functionality to what we had earlier built with Rails. I’m curious about the advantages and disadvantages of using JS versus Rails for web applications. I imagine that considerations of scale and functionality may be factors. Didn’t get into much Rails work today but, wow, I watched a lot of the new videos from Ruby Conf 2013. Key takeaways from those: leave cryptography to the experts; I’ll better understand garbage collection in the future; there’s a wrapper for git for users of Github [conveniently called hub]; running Ruby on robots looks both easy and fun; and programs like MKS rule. ...

Day 20 of MakerSquare. Frontend: Inception references to describe variable scope! Yes! Got my first look at riot.js, which deserves a closer & more in-depth look. Secret for the day: we’ve always been in the window object in JavaScript. Backend: More work with associations and references. Finagled some Haml and even got it to [eventually] do what I want. Learned a few tricks, like reload! in the Rails console to process any changes. ...

Day 19 of MakerSquare. Frontend: We started with a much-needed refresher in Javascript. After Gilbert had us all repeat “‘this’ points to the object calling the function” not once, but twice, I decided to write it down. It could be important. </understatement> As an aside, will the next generation understand jokes referencing closing HTML tags after we all start using Haml and other templating engines in the Future? Anyway, we broke for lunch before getting into `for` loops. Met up with a friend of mine who wants to develop a game to teach kids programming concepts. Luckily, I could follow along with his idea and even understood the funny stories he told about his CS undergrad experiences in the lab. At the very least, I’ll be a much better guest at cocktail parties after this program is over. ...

Day 18 of MakerSquare. All sorts of things going on today, with a half-hour delay due to the weather. Practiced using Git in new ways to collaborate in preparation for the hackathon. In the afternoon, we used YouTube’s API to populate fields in our MyTube web application just based on the video’s ID. And if that wasn’t enough, we watched this video on the projector. Instead of starting to wind down at 4 pm today, we instead started our first hackathon. My group, Team CEE Low [it’s an acronym thing], is working on Text-spiration, a service from which people receive inspirational text messages daily. Users will be able to select from a category of messages and a time of day to receive said message.Everything on the backend seemed cut-and-dry, but after we got to work following dinner, things didn’t look so clear. It probably won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to doing what I signed up for: building stuff. ...

Day 17 at MakerSquare. I had some sort of idea for a title on the bike ride to MKS this morning, but it was lost. Pretty sure it was brilliant and insightful. Rails week continues: Using Active Records to associate tables in the morning: tables talking to each other! Test-driven Rails development in the afternoon: red to green with Rails! Surprise visit from the folks at Ordoro: they brought us burritos and now rank among the greatest people in the world. Started to plan the co-authoring of documentation for a Ruby gem we used in class last week. But, that will have to come later: our first hackathon starts Friday afternoon. It’ll probably be wise to go over my Ruby and Javascript notes tomorrow, and healthy to go over the yoga moves I practiced today, ahead of the madness good times of the coming weekend. 

Day 16 of MakerSquare. More Rails today - are you detecting a theme? Got into the nitty-gritty of CRUD - Create Read Update Delete - systems. We mimicked nearly the entire development history of Web 2.0 over the course of a day. The program has been evolving, as well. We started taking daily progress exams at the end of the lessons. The gut reaction to ‘exam’ is always one of apprehension and resistance, but aren’t we here to be tested? It ties back into the OODA loop, and the near-constant reaction to changing conditions. It certainly wasn’t hyperbole when we were cautioned, on Day 1, that things move quickly around here. ...

Day 15 of MakerSquare. More Rails today, with an introduction to ActiveRecord. Got into the dirt of databases - making them, reading from them, writing to them, modifying them, and deleting them. So much better than messing around with placeholder hashes to store and read data. Ah, the joys of encapsulation. We continued to see our Ruby terminology carry over. As I was discussing with a classmate here at Cafe Bedouins, learning Rails before Ruby seems incomprehensible at this point. One question lingers from the day, though: Why hasn’t Hirb.enable been rolled into the Rails console as a permanent, always-on setting? ...

Day 14 of MakerSquare. All Rails, all day. Routes, parameters, controllers. The diagram was just a stack of blocks at first, but once we started getting into building things, the language of Rails became natural. Well, maybe not natural, but familiar. Ish. We built a YouTube-style video-viewing site, cleverly called MeTube. Initial impressions: lots of capacity to do lots of things, but wow, gotta keep those naming conventions organized. [Note to self: invest in Post-It notes] We worked with hard-coding information into the site, then moved to passing in parameters through the URL - both query strings and dynamic segments. ...