iamwomanposts-blog

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IP Reflection

I’m glad a made a thing; I wouldn’t have been able to do that before. Working on the IP definitely helped improve my skills with meteor. At first, it seemed to be a magical, strange language that I didn’t understand. But once I sat down and went through meteor tutorial step by step and I tried implementing things by myself, it wasn’t that bad. There were quite a few things I didn’t get to complete in my IP and I definitely want to come back to them and fix it in the next few days. Overall, I’m satisfied with the progress that I made. But I think I can still do more. 

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Hopes for IP Future Improvement

Well my big hope for future IP updates is to find an API that can allow me to get song tracks, or at least a link to the video. Echonest can kind of do that, but only if you search by artist. I also want users to be able to create different playlists, not just have one tab for a single playlist. I’m not sure how to implement that exactly, specifically if that would or wouldn't involve multiple collections. My visualization, which was to search through the “hotttnesss” parameters of each artist(their popularity) and graph it, decided not to work before I deployed it sadly. Somehow, the second call to the API made the original API call fail to get results, so I decided I had to scrap that and cry because I had to deploy. I’ll come back to it for the sake of learning. I also hope to add the feature of searching by artist. I did manage to sort the songs by popularity. It shouldn’t be too hard to add this feature, it’s just getting a second API call with the parameter of artist instead of mood. 

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IP Progress

The struggle of the IP was real. I spent the first few sessions of the IP trying to figure out how to user interface, it was wonderful. After going to office hours once, Eni helped me get the data from the Echonest API and it was great! I had real data, for both moods and a list of songs(generated by whatever the user searches)! Then I moved onto the UI. I wanted a navbar (because navbars are cool) to separate the playlist, search, and about page. I went to help room for help with that; basically you need variables that display true when a tab is clicked which determines which template to display. After that, I had a hard time trying to get the data from the server. So I asked for help, the solution was to make a method in the server side and call it in the client side. That way, the data could be used by the server. Then, in a marathon of programming, I made the playlist (kinda) work. You could search for things in a semi-organized manner and add them to the playlist. The IP Meeting happened shortly after that. Then in another flurry of programming, I made users able to log in, have unique playlists, and remove songs from the playlist.

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Reflection 2

Coming into this class, I was unsure of what to expect because of my extremely limited experience in HTML, CSS, and Javascript. My own personal goal was to become more familiar with web development and be able to create a kind of interactive site. I think I definitely gained a lot of technical knowledge from this class. It was very different coming from a theory based CS class going into Web Mashups, where the emphasis is on practical skills and implementing the skills that were learned. I think I mostly achieved my goals. I believe I achieved a good number of the course learning goals. I can now effectively use Javascript to make different programs, whereas before this course I had no idea how to even remotely use Javascript. I can mostly deal with external data, sometimes I still come across problems with trying to access particular data. What I enjoyed about this course is that, rather than teaching us about a specific API, we learned skills and things about APIs that can be generalized and used in different situations. And, in the changing world of technology, this skill is invaluable. I learned about Meteor in this course, but I think I can still do more with this platform. I would like to continue use it and keep learning about it and experimenting with it. Visualizations is one aspect of the course I still have not fully grasped, unfortunately. I certainly want to come back to this. I have saved every D3 resource I could find in the notes and plan on going through them even more thoroughly instead of glossing over them and only half understanding them, a problem I had this semester with learning D3. I had never peer reviewed code before this course, but now I am aware of how it can be useful for both you and your peers. You are able to get feedback and see different implementations of the same project idea. I appreciated this.  As for transferable skills, I think I understand how important it is to reach out and collaborate with peers more than I had before. With complex projects like this, it is not enough to work completely independently on your parts and hope things come together. It’s important to ask questions, clarify points with your peers, especially when your peers understand your point of view as a student and have come across similar issues. Programming is not easy, so there will be challenges and bugs everywhere; one just has to be willing to put the time and effort to overcome the issues. If I were to take the course again, I definitely would have taken advantage of Office Hours and Help Room more and asked more questions. But anyway, I truly enjoyed the course and all it has taught me. 

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Reflection 1

I think my team used the allocated time well. We summarized the problem our app was attempting to solve, how the app is going to solve the problem, and briefly explained the technical details. We each did have the same amount of time to speak, we divided up the slides so each person could contribute equally. The transitions connected well, since the topics were related. My performances could have been improved. I think I could have done a better job making eye contact with the audience, instead of staring at the back of the wall. My voice was clear, but a bit too soft spoken. It could have been more confident. I feel I did not speak too fast or too slow, so the pacing was fine. If I were to give the presentation again, I’d try to come across as more confident with what I was saying. I could have elaborated some of my points more and engaged with the audience in a better manner. But, overall, I think our team did a good job conveying the use of our app. 

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IP Review 2: Laidback Music

I think this is a cool project to do. I like that you want to improve the user experience with this and make music streaming more personal. I think the visualization aspect ties in well with your theme. Could you elaborate on how you’ll visualize the users’ preference and what you’re basing preference on? For me, it seemed preference was based on the acoustic attributes you mentioned.  If that is what preference is based on then, for example, if the user tends to enjoy music with high dancibility then you would try to visualize that? I’m a little unclear about the playlists and the users saving their preferences.  Would the user be able to add any song to a playlist or is this playlist created based off an attribute they enjoy like high dancibility? Anyway, I like the idea! :) I can give you more suggestions/feedback once I have a better idea of how this would work. 

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IP Review 1: Degrees of Separation

First, I just want to say I love playing this game. I like that this would be played with multiple users, it really takes advantage of Meteor’s “magic.” I think this is a really interesting thing to implement. Your description was also, for the most part, clear and detailed. I’m curious to know how the leaderboard standings work. Would it be based on just the number of games won or the user with the highest rate of optimality or fastest time? You could have all these kinds of leaderboards, if possible. I’m a little unclear on how exactly your version of the Wikipedia interface will look like. From my understanding, it would just be a list of the words in the current page the user is on that link to that words page. If so, I think it might be more interesting to include the whole sentence the hyperlinked words are in(if its possible to do). In my experience playing this game, reading through the sentences to find the related words and shortest path was half the fun. Also, related to the possible problems, if the optimization feature is too slow or difficult to implement, I would not feel it would detract from the “funness” of the game.  The visualizations fit well into the game, I like the timer. Just to clarify, how is score calculated exactly?  Anyway, I love this idea. I’m excited to see the progress on this!

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To be fair, Susie made everything work in the wee hours of the morning and that’s amazing.  Credit to Audrey for 98% of the logo. (I found the original magnifying glass, pre beautiful). 

Look at this beauty! This was Diana’s hard work! She and Audrey made the logo! And then Diana used it in our fabulous site!

I had Diana walk me through her bootstrap code because I’ve never done bootstrap before, although I have done Foundation which is similar. Bootstrap is a useful tool,...

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<3

coolest thing EVER check it out !!

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Resources for making things Pretty

Throughout my CSS-and-making-websites-look-nice journey, I came across two nice resources. First, I wanted to make pretty buttons. So I Googled it because that’s how I get all my programming done(just kidding). This site helps with nice buttons: http://css3buttongenerator.com/ Just copy and paste the code into your CSS file and BAM-awesome buttons. And Susie wanted a background for the webpage.  She showed me the site http://subtlepatterns.com/ to get subtle(duh) backgrounds!  Download whatever image you want your website background to be, add it to your file, and change the body background image to the downloaded image name. 

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The Magic of jQuery.ui (tabs) and Bootstrap

My team wanted to make tabs happen in our AM so we could link different htmls. jQuery had two types of tabs: accordion and the normal horizontal tabs. Trying to make these tabs from scratch proved to be really terrible. But with jQuery ui, it only took a few lines of code. And while that was amazing, we ended up not using the tabs because they weren't functional or pretty.  So then I looked at other websites for inspiration. And navbars were a thing, I noticed. Making a pretty navbar with bootstrap was really simple. You add three lines of code and suddenly everything is beautiful and I love it. It turned out, navbars are just unordered lists with link tags(who knew?)

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My AM4 Job: Making Things Pretty

My job in this AM is to make things pretty with the magic of CSS(and some HTML). I’ve never really ever had to make things pretty in the previous AMs (or in my life) because I was always more concerned with functionality. But, I’ve discovered form and user interfaces are just as important as how things work. 

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AM4

This is making me realize I want to work on CSS the next project - as the javascript is slowly but surely making sense but bootstrap is such a mystery to me! Great job Diana. 

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GOOGLE CALENDAR

THINGS ARE ADDING!!! Thanks to Susie the math whiz, we’re finally getting somewhere!

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Growth vs. Fixed Mindset

The concept of a growth vs. fixed mindset is similar to the argument of nature vs. nurture, whether people are a product of their environment or people have innate qualities that define them. I stand by my belief that both are true in a way; people inevitably inherit unique genetic qualities that define them, but are also susceptible to changing based on their environment. The article tied the fixed mindset back to our culture when it discussed the major flaws with the concept of "true love" coming effortlessly. The North American culture has definitely helped breed the fixed mindset. We're taught the appearance of things matter more than the reality, we're taught to focus on the end goal rather than the journey to get there. The mentality of "everyone's a winner" exemplifies this fixed mindset; if everyone get's a trophy at the end of a soccer match, there is no longer a drive for the player to improve. Rather, they should be teaching us that while not everyone can be the champion, we can all make a solid effort to try because that's what helps us grow as people. The fixed mind set is a huge factor in why more people in America don't go into S.T.E.M. There's a misconception that programmers are child prodigies who picked up a computer at the age of 2 and knew everything since then. While some people do have an affinity for problem solving, I've come to learn it's more about the effort people put in. I was certainly in a fixed mindset for a long time; I saw people around me who seemed to be naturally smarter and better at S.T.E.M. I slowly came to realize their passion and hunger to learn more is what made them better. It was not just inherent talent.  My mindset for this class I would hope is growth; I understand things don't come easily and it takes work to solve problems in CS. I love the challenge. Regardless of my grade, I'm happy to be learning more here.

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AM4

Susie wants to learn JSON, Diana wants to learn CSS. I want to learn CSS too, but also want to learn how to work with Google calendar. We are meeting Sunday morning to get to work all together, and Susie and I are meeting Saturday afternoon to brainstorm.

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If the request to Wikipedia doesn't yield any results, this pops up on the info window.