WDI Day Twenty-Nine: Project 2 Kickoff

After a long week of building CRUD app after CRUD app in Rails, today our Project 2 Week was kicked off with an intro to the project requirements. I’ll have to build an app in Rails that uses at least two models with at least one association, have complete RESTful routes, have error handling & validations for all resources, and utilize an ORM to create a database table structure.

I pretty much built the bare bones for my app at the beginning of the week as we went through learning CRUD. So today I worked on cleaning up my older code, adding a user login, styling the app a lot so I can get some inspiration on where to take it (for some reason when things look nicer, I get more motivated), and created another model.

My project is a pretty ambitious one, so I’m not sure if I’ll be able to build it entirely. It’s a drawing app, where users can draw on maps. It utilizes the CRUD functionality, but one of my biggest challenges will be to figure out how to store the images that users create. I’ve nearly completed the drawing functionality with JavaScript, and have figured out how to save the drawings as images. Another challenge is that I’d like to figure out how to implement Google’s image map API so that I can change the canvas background image dynamically to whatever location a user is interested in seeing.

Here’s a screenshot of my work in progress:

WDI Day Eight: ATM Lab

I’m definitely out of my comfort zone now when it comes to WDI, which is great – let the learning commence!

Today was another lab day, and it was definitely a struggle. Our assignment was to create an ATM where users could deposit and withdraw funds in a checking and savings account. If the account value was zero, a CSS class needed to be assigned to the ATM that highlighted the balance in red.

At the end of the day, I managed to complete the lab along with the bonus assignments. My biggest issue was being able to make the code cleaner. I was able to get the functionality down right, it was just a matter of writing shorter code. I guess that’s something for me to aspire to?

Overall, I’m pretty proud that I was able to get something to work. Makes you feel like a bit of a magician when your javaScript is functional.

Takeaways:

  • Console.log is really useful in figuring out how the browser is reading variables
  • Figuring out when a user is clicking a button within a specific div
  • Pseudo coding well in the beginning can really help you out later
  • Struggling with an exercise until you figure it out can help solidify some of the overall javaScript concepts

WDI Day Five: PseudoCoding and Intro to JS

Finally, the day I was waiting for arrived – working with JavaScript! Although today was also more of a review for me, I did find myself realizing I definitely need to do some extra work in my free time this weekend just to make sure I’m at the level I want to be at with JavaScript.

In the morning we did a few exercises involving PseudoCoding, which I realized is a pretty difficult concept to wrap my mind around. I’ll have to make sure I practice writing pseudo code and will check with my instructors to make sure I’m doing that properly.

We also got to play around with a fun and addictive game, Cookie Clicker:

cookie-clicker

Once we dug into JavaScript, we reviewed data types, conditionals, and ended the day with objects and functions. One of our homework assignments definitely looks like it will be a lot of fun to fiddle around with – it’s a choose your own adventure where the prompt boxes will change based on user input. I’m excited to get started, and hope I don’t run into too many issues. Getting started with JavaScript for any assignment is usually a little tough for me. I’m hoping that will change fairly soon.

Some Fun Resources