Tag: codingbootcamp

Day 61: Showtime!

Today was the day our final projects were due. I managed to do my final GitHub push at a bit past 11:00 a.m. I had to add some SELECT/UPDATE/DELETE options on our SQL code we provided for alternatively loading data via MySQL (vs. PostgreSQL). Also, I had to beef up my README file a bit. Oddly enough, my README files are all the rage with my instructor and with my classmates…

We all did well with our presentations—everyone did a great job with their sites! Yours truly had some technical difficulties, due to not having used Skype in meetings for over three months now. For the life of me, I couldn’t get the damn “Presenting” bar to go away, so that I could switch browser tabs. It was the height of embarrassing, especially when one of my fellow students (who’s probably half my age) had to help me get rid of it. Other than that, demonstrating my site went well. If you’re reading, Mary S., I invoked you as a prospective knitter on my site, to walk through the functionality. I had you register for the site, log in, flake out, needing to change your email on the site, and then you decided to delete your account. I showed off my @ViewChild functionality code used to “Go to Top” without reloading an entire page—I’m probably too ludicrously proud of this, but it’s because I figured it out by researching for myself. I think that is our biggest takeaway from our entire training—learning how to tap every resource we can to figure out an issue.

I feel relieved the presentation is over, but disappointed. This is it for fun coding for the week. From here on in is the transition back to reality…

Day 60: I think I can, I think I can, I think I can…

We’re nearing the finish line for our final project, and for Code Academy as a whole. I’m pretty set on the project, except to test one more time and make sure I’ve done a run-through for the presentation tomorrow. I’m somewhat nervous about the presentation, but we’ve done these before, so it shouldn’t be too much different.

I’m feeling sad…I’ve spent the last three months with a great group of fellow students. I’m going to miss everyone! I know…I’m insane. Some of them will be working in my same office, so it won’t completely be goodbye. Speaking of offices, I’m also going to miss being in the downtown office. Granted, I know from past experience that the long commute is the seventh circle of hell in the winter, but I’m going to miss being in the middle of everything.

On a more entertaining note, I attempted to install ProsgreSQL on my home laptop (to see if I could run my site from home) and it was a fiasco. It asked for the port number, but I think I was supposed to change it to 3000. As a result, despite REINSTALLING it and specifically indicating Port 3000, the app, when opened, is still expecting the default port, and now gives big, ugly errors. I’m going to have to figure this out tomorrow.

Day 58: We have liftoff!

Today was the official beginning of our final project, using our Capstone pages, our server from the last project, and Angular. Despite my misgivings, things are going well so far! I tested my server changes, after getting rid of the page renderings, and everything checked out. I’ve been doing what our instructor suggested and approaching things one step at a time. I created the client and I did the easy stuff. I copied in each component that used to be a “handlebar,” set up routing, and fired up the pages, one by one–just to make sure they appeared. They didn’t have functionality yet, of course, but they did show up! I was DYING to bring in the patterns page, too, but that’s going to be a nice-to-have, if I can get the other pages working in time. I also have a Team Details page that would be fantastic to get working by the Tuesday Noon deadline, but that one is really on the “I want a pony” wishlist…

This evening, I managed to get the code done for the Leagues and Users data. I even managed to add code to do a loop to dynamically create the Leagues list on the home page! I may have to do some googling to figure out how to bring in the Teams data, seeing as that has member data as a subset of the teams data. I’m happy with what I’ve accomplished so far, though.

Day 57: Serving It Up

This was one of those days where everything went wrong. I dropped my smoothie getting out the door, I faced horrendous traffic getting into class, and I spilled what was left of my smoothie all over myself.

And then there was Angular.

We’ve had only three days of Angular instruction, and now we’re being let loose to modify our sites to use this for our final project. We also found out today that since we are no longer using Handlebars or JavaScript for our site, we need to jettison all client-side JavaScript and handlebar pages to make way for Typescript and components. We have to get rid of any routers or controllers for former Handlebar pages in the server code. This poses a bit of an issue for me. Everything in my server was set up by—you guessed it—pages! I set up routes by pages, and under the route and controller scripts I had code for each page, with the different CRUD operations for the page under this, which in turn had service code script files. I know it sounds odd, but it worked. This afternoon, I had to reorganize it all by the files we’re using and their CRUD (pun intended). I have to admit that this is a cleaner way of doing it, but it took ages to set up. I had a few false starts, but the server finally fired up at 4:45. I still need to employ the dreaded Postman to test it tomorrow.

On a humorous note, this evening I met with my fellow IIBA members. I’m technically no longer a BA but I’m still a member of IIBA, as I’m an officer and my term isn’t up for a year and a half. I recently swapped duties with another officer, so I needed to meet with her and other people to show them all how to send out notices for chapter events and how to update the website. Overall, it went well, and I think they understood things.

When we got all done, I realized they were all staring at me.

“What?” I asked. (Was it my breath?)

“You…you…you’re beginning to…”

“Yes?”

“It’s…uncanny!”

“What?”

I couldn’t figure what they were driving at.

Finally, someone blurted it out.

“You sound like a…DEVELOPER!” They all nodded in unison.

“Yeah, it’s really weird.”

Someone else piped up, “And you actually SWORE!”

Honestly, I’m sort of proud.

Day 55: Angular-ing for a clue…

When you google or bing the word “Angular” in a browser, you return:

“Angular is a TypeScript-based open-source web application framework…”

OR

“Angular Cheilitis is a condition that causes red, swollen patches in the corners of your mouth…” I’ll spare you the details, except to say that, yes, this can be caused by a fungus, or as I like to call it, a “fungus amungus.”

The second definition, pertaining to festering sores, is a MUCH better descripton of my entire day attempting to understand Angular. For our final project we are going to have to convert our Handlebar pages into this format, along with our code. I’m hoping to have some sort of clue in the next few days, because right now, I have NO idea how I’m going to do this for my Capstone pages.

Speaking of my pages, I took leave of my senses this evening and attempted to have the server render yet another Capstone page–the Edit Team Details page. I’m over and above where I need to be for activating pages, but I just HAD to try one more…I’ve spent the last 3 hours of my life (that I’m never getting back again) attempting to do a PUT request that hitherto worked just FINE with the old server. I screwed everything up so badly I had to wipe out the entire folder, clone the code from my GitHub Repo again, and reinstall the npm packages.

I think I need to quit for the evening, before I break anything else…

Day 54: Reprieve…

I’m not sure what divine intervention occurred today, but our instructor pushed out the due date. Instead of having to have our entire server done by 5:00 Friday, he extended the deadline to Saturday at 5:00 p.m…THEN he left the room, came back in, and declared that he didn’t care when it was done, as long as it was done so that it would work with our final Angular project.

I spent most of the day working on router/controller/services again, but with our instructor’s help, I finally managed to understand how to apply it to my existing connections. Anything else wrong was idiotic typos or case-sensitive issues. My personal favorite catastrophe was the “looping” server. All of a sudden, my console started spewing out “get JSON 404 over and over and OVER again. I tried commenting out code and taking out scripts, thinking they were the culprit. Come to find out, it was due to having the Node server debugger still open.

As of Friday afternoon, I STILL wasn’t done. Even though the due date has been pushed out, I’m going to work on the rest this weekend, so that I’m ready for learning Angular on Monday. I need to clean up the code, make sure pages validate, add comments, copy over the Postman tests, and pull out any unnecessary console.log troubleshooting code.

ALSO, I was so proud of myself for finishing the edit user profile page, but at the end of the day I realized that I had completely forgot to enact the delete function. Oops…

If I have time, I may try to render more pages. We only have to go as far as the landing page, but my site makes no sense without at least having the crocheting and knitting patterns page, too!

Day 52: MySQL…the Sequel…ize

Today we continued our MySQL adventure with something called “Sequelize” which honestly sounds like a Star Trek term—as in, “Mr. Sulu, sequelize the photon torpedoes!” It also sounds like something done with movie franchises that are well past their prime (“Rocky XIX,” anyone?). The entertaining thing is that autocorrect is coming up with all sorts of naughty words for Sequelize—especially if you initially spell it wrong.

Sequelize is an ORM (object-relational mapping) which we used for MySQL. This is also used for something called PostgreSQL, and yes, I think our instructor is just making stuff up now. All kidding aside, PostgreSQL seems to be very similar to Oracle tables, so I’m sure this will be beneficial to understand when I eventually return to our department.

The thing that’s giving me a coronary is that we need to learn all this stuff, at the rate of one major concept per day, and then APPLY IT TO THE CAPSTONE. I just barely have my routes operational from our last lab, and even so, my pages are not what one might call “functional,” except for the ones that applied to the requirements of the lab. To top it off, we now have to divide everything into routes, controllers, services, models…and I know I’m forgetting something. This is supposed to make the code easier to maintain, but honestly, if you can’t FIND anything, how much simpler is it??? I already get confused about which code is server code vs. client code. This is going to send me running screaming into the night…oh, right. We live in the boonies and THIS is what’s out there:

I’ll have to take my chances with the scary code…

Day 50: Getting My Kicks…

…not exactly on Route 66…

As I mentioned last time, I did get our two assigned labs done. HOWEVER, I’m evidently insane, because I went nuts today and decided to try to convert my entire capstone project into our newly-learned Node Express hbs page format with routes and partials. I did manage to get all my pages to render, but as far as functionality…this was sort of hit-or-miss. The simple files were easy to create routes for. However, one of our databases has team info and then member info under each team, which is proving tricky to try to create routes for. I tried to check our original capstone server code to see if I could try to figure out how to crack the code (so to speak). At about 6:00 p.m. I finally created one “team-by-league” route which now makes my team page fully functional! I’m hoping to be able to figure out the other team/member routes.

The other issue is that my original capstone code relied heavily on URLParams. Now that we’re using routes I need to figure out a way to pass data to the member pages (add/delete/edit). I tried session storage, which I’d hoped would be the magic bullet, and indeed it was—for team data. For the member data underneath the team it was a fiasco. The code loops through all the members of a team and then stores the data for the LAST member in session storage. When you click an icon to go to a member’s edit or member delete pages, you land on the LAST person’s pages, no matter who you pick. I need to figure out how to pass the team ID and member ID to grab member data using yet another route (which you know is going to be convoluted).

Well, tomorrow is another day!

Chuck Berry – Get Your Kicks on Route 66

Updated the Blog! Day 49: What a difference a day makes…

Thank heavens! Friday was much better than the previous day. Our instructor decided to take us through the process of using Node Express Generator and Postman again, this time relating it to our labs. He went through the steps of how to write code for a server connection and how to test this in Postman. I think what helped us was understanding the steps we needed to go through to write everything correctly and how to test as we went along. We managed to finish not only the Friday lab, but a future one, and in my case, I started a page for the lab after THAT.

In the meantime, this weekend we hit the beach again! I brought my knitting and we had a lovely view.

I have to say, I don’t have dreadful Sundays anymore. It used to be that, by Sunday night, I’d be dreading Monday morning. As hard as Coding boot camp has been, I STILL look forward to each new day of coding. I’m still incredibly grateful for getting this chance.

Day 48: Deer in the Headlights

This was one of those days where I almost stormed out of the classroom. I had to remind myself that we only have a few more weeks before we’re going to be REALLY confused in our new jobs, and that this is probably a picnic in comparison…

There is something dreadful about learning things piecemeal, and then having to cobble it all together for an assignment—I know…just like real life. Today we combined login/registration screen logic, get and post logic, Node express, listing out file data, etc. into one site. The truly mind-bending thing was that we used Node Express Generator to spit out the scaffolding, and then we had to take all the bits and pieces we’ve learned this week and somehow apply them to this new format.

Among the disasters:

1. My site got completely hosed by the ****ing layout.hbs file. What was a normal-looking index page all of a sudden resembled some mutant atrocity. The only way I can describe it is that it looked like our cat Jack jumped on the keyboard in the middle of coding and then used his ass to press “save.” This particular issue turned out to be due to some random css code I’d somehow copied in by mistake for my login page formatting.

2. Partial hbs files are now unnecessary due to the aforementioned layout.hbs file. This has COMPLETELY wiped out the careful work I’d done previously dividing page contents into the partials. NOT THAT I’M RESENTFUL.

3. I also struggled over trying to figure out if I needed one script file or one per page, seeing as there was overlapping logic.

4. I compared notes with others, and think we all suffered from tiny gremlins scurrying away with what’s left of our brain cells, because many of us could not, for the life of us, remember how the hell we listed out fields into an unordered list, let alone how we previously did gets and posts in AJAX calls.

5. I personally kept getting confused over what went in server code and what went in regular front-end script code—especially since we’ve been introduced to routes, or as I like to call them, the bastard cousins of server script.

I’m hoping to gain more clarity tomorrow, as we have to combine everything into a Friday project that we aren’t starting until 1:00 p.m. The idea is to have NO actual html pages, except for bare-bones, as we have to use Postman (which I barely understand) to test the server code instead.

I have the ugly feeling that I’m not going to have a weekend…