Author: J.C. Cross

Finally turned in the two-week project. I need to be more prepared for the presentations.  I also realized that presentation is everything, no matter how much work you put in.

We start on Node.js tonight!

Project #1 due Tuesday. Yelp API was too hard to get going. Looking for an alternative, perhaps Travel Advisor, for bars and restaurants.

Learned too much about git 8^)

Will be busy for most of the weekend.

Well into project #1. Populating page from SeatGeek API. Working on category and wildcard searches. Handed off the Yelp API to my classmate Emmanuel. It’s just the two of us and Margot.

First project underway – using APIs for events, bars, restaurants, etc. to create a funseeker search for San Diego.

Just did a wireframe, initial tasks, Google doc of our reqs. Met two great people who I will work with. We also have another Challenge due next week, so we may hook up on the weekend.

Well this was quite an awakening. Matt is very thoughtful. One of the other students continues to be bright as well.

We had a mini-project that we did not finish, but I really grew in the JS and collaboration area. I think next time I will be more ready.

Matt is a great teacher. Works for Google, smart, and listens to you. We got more into fetch. So much easier than XHR. Still, good to have the programming experience I do have. (I plan to redo some private sites with Javascript instead of Actionscript.)

Looks like there is going to be some kind of review tonight and perhaps talk about our first group project. Collaboration will be important going forward. I have some Google questions to ask. Most important, Google interview questions.

So Jeslyn left. We now have a new instructor who works for Google. Excited! I have a few Google interview questions that I had heard. What in the world is a hashmap?

I’d bomb that one.

But we got into AJAX and fetch. In the old days, back when I worked for the SDUT, I used XHR for AJAX. I developed some media players using XHR and my bro’s FJRoadtrip.com, all with Flash (“AFLAX”) as the front-end. We know what happened with Flash.

Then I saw the development of Jquery’s ajax() method. Fetch is something new to me. So much easier. Also learned about using the GitHub API to get repo info on any user. No security problem there as it’s all public.

Big challenge project to create a daily planner, due next Tues.

Two days of Jquery UI, Bootstrap and for some reason, Moment.js. I say that because it’s no longer being maintained. More to come…

Post day 15: this is all pretty east stuff, but goes more toward full stack. We had an hour-long mini-project at the end last night. Teamwork! We weren’t able to finish, but it was fun brainstorming.

The camp has been more client-side than I thought it would be. But when over 6 months there is plenty of study time. I do have a Udemy account with a JS class that I previously purchased and will be a great supplement.

Jquery! Good refresher. Learned some aspects of it that I have not used, like loading data from external sources. Used to use vanilla AJAX for that.

Unfortunately, our instructor Jeslyn is leaving, so switching to a new instructor is a little abrupt. hmmm

Day 12 we looked into LocalStorage and SetInterval again. Wow. This had a tough in-class project. As a group, we were just trying to get a button that called a function working. I wasn’t alone at least.

Tomorrow we get more into Web APIs.

So last night we learned more about the DOM, Web APIs and data attributes. Event bubbling finally makes some sense. I had been putting off reading and learning about it. I am still not sure about stopPropagation(); some more study needed there.

I have seen attributes like data-number (dataset), but thought they were some server-side thing. I used to use class names and even IDs for data storage, but this is a great method for passing data with your HTML with nonstandard attributes.

Challenge number three involves creating a password generator. I’ve started and will be working on it over the weekend.

We finished up Javascript (still using it though) and moved on to Web APIs. At the end of last night, a lot of us had a brain twister. It seemed only basic because I had used SetInterval before, but the requirements were confusing. We had a timer than would count down from 5 and then a message would appear a few words at a time. This was confusing. Was it the countdown we were setting an interval too, or the message? I was stumped. We all asked for help from one of the TAs. We also have another coding challenge due next week that I have for some reason not found.

Still it was a great time and it’s fun. On day 9 I had my first experience coding with others and loved it!

Today we learned some good stuff: I did not understand the syntax for function expressions v. function declarations. I also brought up one issue I have always had, closures, and the TA told me in a PM that we would be covering it soon. How to pass values between functions and functions within functions are some hard things for me. I did ask about the level of math needed and the instructor, Jeslyn said the use of it depends on the program. Good news 8^)

Today we started Javascript! Yay! Brushing off the old skills and learning the proper way to do things, being previously self-taught. Great pace for the class. The faculty and staff are so personable. Enjoying!

OK so now there’s a few things I have not known. CSS variables are new to me. Similar to SASS and other preprocessers. I love Flex, what a godsend. Next week, Javascript!

We are moving from advanced CSS this week to Javascript next. It’s filling all the areas where I was weak or just did not know.

So we discussed advanced CSS. I am still doing some catch-up on Flexbox, but I get the gist. There are a variety of people in class, all smart and near where I am in dev. Things are picking up.