Week 7, leggo
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Week 7 baby! This week was all about JavaScript and JQuery. We pretty much spent the entire week working on one project, a trip planner for the Financial District. It was a rails app but there was very little ruby going on. We wrote JavaScript and JQuery to basically change the page based on a user’s interactions with the page. As a new web developer, it was fascinating to me that this was even possible and at first it doesn’t even seem necessary. Ya its fun but, why not just reload the page? It all became clear to me on Thursday when David said that javascript is enabling web apps to act more like apps we use on our computer and phone. In Microsoft Word, all of your interactions happen on one page. You never navigate away from your doc. The app that does this the best on the web now is probably gmail. Most of the page stays the same while the content changes. This is what all web apps should be like. Its a much more cohesive design. When David said this, it was like a little light bulb went off in my head.
On Tuesday I had a minor freak out. I was on the roof with Jorge and it hit me that our program is going to end and that end is going to come soon. The past 7 weeks have flown by and I can only imagine the next 5 will go even faster. Its been 7 weeks and I only have one project, the hackathon, to show off so far. My goal is to have 3 so I’m going to have to get at it if I want to finish two more in 5 weeks. The good news is that I have a pretty good idea what I want to do for both projects. The first is a google chrome extension. Nimit helped me come up with the idea last week in our one on one. The extension would allow users to mark youtube videos at different points in the video so they could easily revert back to them rather than drag the little ball back to arooound the part they want to re-watch. The original idea was meant for people watching how-to videos where you might have to watch the same part of the video multiple times but I am sure there could be other uses as well. I’m probably going to spend this weekend and next on the extension and then hopefully it will be close to done so that I can transition into my capstone project.
My capstone project has to be sweet. Thats how you get the big J O B. The newest and coolest technology in web dev right now is MVC (Model View Controller) patterns in javascript. We’ll gloss over what that means and I’ll skip to what it entails. It basically allows you to make web apps feel like native apps on your computer, as I talked about above. But the goal of the web should not be to imitate native apps, the web should do more, because it can. What the web does best is connect people and my web app should do the same. The web app I have in mind will fell like a native app but allow multiple users to work on the same page at once. If you have ever worked on a google doc at the same time as another person you know what experience I’m talking about. I’m not sure what technologies google uses to create this experience but my plan right now is to use Ember for the MVC pattern and Pusher to connect users together. I feel pretty strongly that this is the app I should build as it will put me on the edge of web dev. But there is also a small portion of me that really wants to use MongoDB and maybe some D3 data visualization for some type of energy project. idk. Too many options really. But thats a good problem to have I guess. No complaints, just inner strife.
Boom, I finally wrote a ‘we’blog post of normal length. As always, enjoy and let me know if you have any questions.
Cheers, Kyle