aaroncordovez

[aaroncordovez]

Final Project Presentation

I love coding. I love programming. I love Ruby. I love Javascript.

LOL! 

It's fun and exciting to build sites. It's funny though because I've been making toy sites that no one is really going to use. I can't wait until I get into the major leagues and make real apps. It's exhilarating to think about it and how much more rewarding it will be.

I've spent so much time and worked so hard on OmniFive and it's (almost) all for naught. No one will actually purchase anything on there, but it does look pretty cool. 

I presented it (Omnifive) as my final project today to the other students at App Academy. I was amazed that my heart was actually beating fast as I was preparing to go up there. You'd think a person wouldn't get nervous around the people he's been around constantly for 9 weeks. It turned out to be great and the 2 minutes of presentation went by so fast.

Now we're in the next phase. I've been looking at some job descriptions and have seen that I qualify for some of them. I can't wait to start showing more people what I can do. =D

[aaroncordovez]

First Look @ OmniFive

You can check out my Final Project website here: www.OmniFive.com

I've set up database features to keep track of orders to enable e-commerce to occur on the site. It uses nifty creation by associations when ordering gigs and its related extras.

I'm adding more styles and bells and whistles, but the overall functionality of the site is definitely working. Making this stuff in a week is pretty amazing, I can just imagine what I can do in an entire year of working at a company on  specific platform or website.

App Academy isn't for the faint hearted.

It's funny because I've talked to some people as I've progressed through the course and told them I'm studying/working for 80 hours per week and some of them get completely shocked. They can't even fathom taking on that much workload. This definitely is not a "get rich quick" kind of thing. It takes hard work (and is worth it).

[aaroncordovez]

Styling intricacies

There are so many CSS tricks out there and I'm learning more and more each day of FInal Projects. 

Today I get FilePicker set up on my site as well as User profile editing. I've also got most of the Gigs Show page done. It's starting to look pretty good.

I also set up a few more Backbone Views to make things more Modular. After re-using views in more places, you see it's real value and have to scrape off any non-reusable parts.

Tomorrow I want to complete the Gigs Show view, as well as the Order Completion page. 

[aaroncordovez]

OmniFive - Buy Anything for $5

I've decided on the name for my project: OmniFive. 

Things are shaping up and I enjoy makings things work. However, I feel a bit behind. I've only worked on the project for 4 days, and taking that into consideration, I think that it's going pretty well. 

Today I wrapped up creating Order Extras by association in the Orders Controller. It's pretty awesome how Rails can create Models by association and save them to the database with only IDs. 

I also added a main Navigation bar and a footer to the website & started final layout of the gig show page.

Tomorrow I plan to complete the styling of the Gig Show page, set up the Filepicker gem to upload photos, and style the Order Show page.

[aaroncordovez]

Surprised again - Backbone got schooled

When we were first introduced to Backbone, I was really struggling. Honestly, it was some of the hardest days for me. 

I knew that I'd grasped everything else even after struggling, but I was concerned about becoming actually comfortable ever with Backbone. 

Now my Final Project, A Fiverr.com clone, so far has 8 Backbone Views with numerous Backbone models and Collections and it is second nature now. I really have to give a big thank you to Andrew Larson who helped me on the weekend before last answering my questions about the flow of Backbone and what parts of the code did what.

After my basic confusions were cleared up, things got so much easier and I am again comfortable and proficient. This is probably a process I will go through many times in my programming career.

If there is one thing that I've learned, is that if I continue to immerse myself in learning, I will get it. It's been done before and can be grasped.

[aaroncordovez]

Buy Anything for $5 - Final Project

At Fiverr.com you can buy tons of stuff for 5 bucks, or get some job done for 5 bucks.

That's exactly what my site will be doing. It's called Gigrr right now, (you will pay for certain gigs). I'm pretty excited at how it's going and can see the leeway to create pretty much anything we want.

I love Agile development because you can immediately use your product, there is no long haul of a wait, but instead many releases, each with something to bring to the table.

I am seeing tons of smart people around me also moving forward and their projects and it makes me very excited to see what we will have at the end of next week.

Development completed today:

Rails Authentication - Sign in, Sign out, log in, log out, replete with CSRF protection.

Gigs Rails Model, Backbone Model and Collection and Gigs Index Backbone View, made up of Backbone Index item views and.

Plans for tomorrow: Create Backbone Gigs Show page, top navigation bar, Begin adding Extra features and integrate that into the gigs show pages. 

[aaroncordovez]

Awesome Interaction w/ Trello & JQuery UI

JQuery is a gift from up above. Doing what seems like exceedingly hard tasks can be done very easily with some nice JQuery code, which comes with great documentation.

Here is a screenshot of my Trello Clone:

Dragging and dropping individual items within lists, onto other lists, and moving the lists themselves around. Setting up the placeholder image was very simple and the CSS classes are even provided for easy styling. You can't tell from the Screenshot, but I also turn your cursor into a hand that moves the divs around.

The hardest part was persisting the movements into the Database but that turned out to be quite simple in the end.

I'm pretty stoked about my final project and can't wait to see what everyone else's final project turns out like.

[aaroncordovez]

Trello Clone

Backbone is getting more and more familiar. I know that we are learning this stuff very fast, and it really pays off to see Apps in action. Final projects are upon us, and we will definitely be creating some amazing stuff. I'm excited to see  what everyone else will do, but am even more excited to build my own project.

[aaroncordovez]

Yes. That is me and Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto, Chief Designer of Ruby. Amazing. He's extremely personalable and friendly, just like Ruby.

Fun fact: Matz made Ruby just for himself to use initially, and now Ruby is everywhere.

[aaroncordovez]

Week 7 Day 3

Backbone. Woah. It's a beast. I'm glad that we are immersing ourselves into this topic to fully grasp all of it's parts. It isn't always pretty but I know that eventually, looking back at it, it will be a breeze. Just like how Rails is now.

[aaroncordovez]

Continuing Pokedex, Backbone Style

Backbone is getting simpler and I see how lots of features have been created for the programmer's comfort. I can see how it can create great Apps, and give them speed.

Me and my programming pair did well today. 

Can't wait until Thursday to see Matz speak live.

[aaroncordovez]

Gotta code them all, Poke'code

So today we built a Backbone based App on showing various pokemon and their various skills. I am really liking the speed of Backbone, it's really quick. 

The amount of sophistication of a Rails App with Backbone as well would have been daunting before App Academy, so many parts and idiosyncrasies, but since we learn it all bit by bit it becomes understandable. Coding is quite an adventure and it takes dedication and meticulous study and practice, but in the end, it pays off. 

[aaroncordovez]

Diving straight into JQuery with AJAX

We're learning faster and faster every day. With a short intro today we dove right into AJAX and built a web app that is extremely dynamic. I am getting more impressed about myself each day. I can only imagine being able to work on larger projects where we commit to one thing and work on it for weeks or even months. The creation and payoff (satisfaction) will be huge I am sure.

I want to build so much stuff.

[aaroncordovez]

Did I say that Jquery is awesome?

Jquery is really amazing. Using transitions and CSS along with JQuery can make some really awesome results. Making JQuery Plugins it pretty rad. We can make almost any functionality of the web.

I can see that with more and more practice JQuery will get even better and better. :-) 

Javascript is definitely turning out to be a lot friendly than I initially anticipated.

[aaroncordovez]

Jquery is awesome

Jquery is pretty awesome. It's very apparent that this library has taken the JS community by storm for good reason. In the intro to Effective Javascript  Brendan Eich talks about how JQuery took off and gives it tons of praise. I can see how this library is enormously helpful.

App Academy is the bomb, learning every important aspect of programming in a very intensive schedule. This is what more people need to experience in life: hard work and dedication.

[aaroncordovez]

Google Homepage Styling, easy

It was great to get back into CSS. We've lived in the Ruby and JS worlds for a while and have been very distant from styling. I can say that I know how to make things look like they should, witness Google Homepage made by me and my pair today:

However, the rules and conventions of CSS are less obvious. I tried to make things as non-random as possible and do I feel that the code was fairly clean, but at the same time I feel that CSS is less precise than Ruby or JS.

I've spent some time going back to my Asteroids game and getting that moving forward, as well as working on my www.namesfrom.com website. 

I can't wait to really get going with JQuery, I'm already loving it.

[aaroncordovez]

Asteroids + Solo Project

I made a website this past weekend that will generate random names. This is a fun web-app to make random names: www.NamesFrom.com It will make random names from Game of Thrones right now, but it will expand to include more TV shows or games that people like to play. It's good to know that I can set out an idea and in the fraction of a day I an turn it into something.

Today we built Asteroids in about 4 hours and it was really awesome. Names pacing and inheritance in Javascript turned out to be really easy; the theory of these things turned out to be much harder than when actually implementing them. Namspacing in Javascript is pretty easy and thinking about making functions private or not is so easy as well! I'm liking javascript more and more as I feel it's more ubiquitous and user-friendly for simple web apps.

I'm definitely learning a ton of Javascript and using it is becoming more and more enjoyable as well.