Introduction to Sinatra after building a reservation system with JavaScript. It was a half day and when I had an opportunity to get a ride home, a strange thing happened: I didn’t jump at the opportunity. I had enjoyed experimenting and learning Sinatra, and wanted to keep going. Momentum is key in situations like this (cue a speech about inertia being synonymous with death, set to take place in two weeks). ...
That thing when your design is foiled by a pop-up window.
Day 12 at MakerSquare. Inspired by yesterday’s talk, I got up at 7am to bang on my keyboard and attempt to understand the Twitter gem. I didn’t get far, but I had inadvertently prepared for the day. Front-end: $(this) & jQuery. The concepts were almost confusing, but not quite. I may have had an advantage today because my partner is an old-hand in the Java world. Interesting bit: ‘undefined’ is not less than 2. ...
Day 11 at MakerSquare. Started the day with a motivational/direction-giving/advise-giving talk from a graduate of cohort #2, who two weeks out from graduating, has accepted an offer at a local company, which is sort of a big deal. The main bit of advice for us was that we should code, code, and code. And then code some more. Front-end: Javascript objects look like hashes but they’re not; they’re objects. We saw something like this structure later in the day, which was a great way to reinforce it. ...
I had a dream the other night that I initialized a man with magnets in his hands. Day 10 of MakerSquare. Project Day is Friday is Tie Day. Back-end: Working with tests and Rspec to build out a program to score a game of tennis, as described on the Coding Dojo. Jammed up my Sublime Text’s RubyTest package so I have to hop over to the terminal to run my tests like I was sort sort of prole. So, fixing that is going on my list for the weekend, right after I code up some deuce and advantage action. ...
Day 8 at MakerSquare. Came across this image and it’s fairly representative of my learning experiences of the day, specifically the “No” and the choppiness. Back-end: Introduction to rspec and test-/build-driven design. Follow along with the code during the lecture, take notes, work through the lesson. All good. Sit down to write my own tests and, well, see above image. Front-end: More Javascript, specifically jQuery functions. Same story as the morning: follow along, take notes, work through the lesson, but sit down to do my own and …no. ...
Day 7 at MakerSquare. Back-end: Algorithms demystified. Got into the nitty and/or gritty of the Great Hash Versus Array Quandry. There’s the balance to strike between what’s best for the computer [which really is about the user] and what’s easiest to write. Ruby was created with the user [read: programmer] in mind; I wonder where the other trade-offs will be. Spent too long drawing diagrams and writing pseudo-code to solve an aspect of an extra credit problem that wasn’t actually requested. Ha. Takeaway: Beware the trap of walking around with my Ruby-hammer, looking for the question-nails. ...
Day 6 at MakerSquare. Week 2. This time, I’m in a new building, which is really the old building. The atmosphere is different, but that might just be the absence of glass walls and paint fumes. Upsides: standing desk and a coffee maker.Downsides: one bathroom for 20+ dudes and too much coffee. Back-end now happens in the morning, which is the opposite of last week. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse [but it’s probably neither - “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them”]. Dug deep into Ruby classes with my new pair. Seeing as I’m writing this after catching up on the morning’s work [at 2245], maybe we dug too deep. If we hadn’t though, I wouldn’t have learned that the ‘puts’ method looks for a custom 'to_s’ method in classes, and print that output as opposed to the unreadable-by-human object! My notes from that moment read as, “implicit class methods to make objects readable?! mind blown!” ...
Start of my redesign for Austin Books & Comics. A matter of getting the content in, taking care of some non-critical bugs, and building out the rest of the pages. Not pictured: nifty expanding ‘store’ hours bar revealing the actual store hours
Day 5 at MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. & also project day. Front-end: Pick a website and redesign it. I had originally picked the site for my favorite diner in town, Kerbey Lane. Excellent pancakes, cluttered website. It was correctly suggested that the scope of that redesign would be too much. I then picked another local institution, Austin Books & Comics. I started by sketching out some mockups and jumped in. No good. No good at all. ...