Tag: handlebars

Day 64: When one door closes…

…we hope my ID badge still works in the revolving door back at the office.

It’s the last day of class. I’m feeling an immense sense of gratitude. I’m sad our three months of training are over, as I’m going to miss everyone. We are all going to meet weekly for additional follow-up training for a few months, but that’s going to be over Skype, so it’s not going to quite be the same. It’s also been nice to put a lot of everyday “busy-ness” on the back burner while I focused on classwork—I got to see what was really important. There are a few things in my life that I think I’m going to let go by the wayside, as they didn’t turn out to be as important as I once thought…not the knitting group, though! Never!

I want to thank everyone for making this possible (at this point, they’re all reading my blog). I wasn’t sure, in the beginning, if I could pull this off at an age where many of my friends are retiring. The last time I coded anything was over 10 years ago, and that was mainframe reporting. Now I’m able to create functional sites with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Bootstrap, Node.js, Angular/TypeScript, MySQL, Handlebars, etc. Going forward, I’m going to learn Java. I couldn’t have done it without the Code Academy, our great instructors, and the managers that pulled it all together.

I’ve been asked if I’m going to keep up the blog. The answer to that is a resounding YES! Think about it…transitioning back to the department I left as a business analyst, and am now returning to as a developer–it’s material that’s just going to write itself.

I do hope my new laptop shows up soon…

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 56: Breaking it down…

After my little adventure last night where I almost permanently hosed my server, I decided to leave well enough alone for now and just go with the pages I’ve rendered so far. If we’re going to have to rewrite pages in Angular, I’d just as soon not have too much to convert. I do want to work on eventually converting them all, so that I can practice different types of server routing…Oh my God…I really AM turning into a nerd…

Today’s deeper dive into Angular was a bit better than yesterday, although I’m still not sure HOW we’re going to pull off rewriting our pages. I’ve been reading ahead and it STILL looks confusing. I’m hoping that as we go along it will become clearer. I get the concept of breaking things (the partials and views we have now) into components, but we’re launching into another round of divding things up further into routes, components, and providers (services). We did a few of these today and I STILL have no idea how to determine what goes into which type of file.

In other more exciting news, I believe I’ve figured out how to vary my nav bar using Handlebar conditions, depending on whether a user is logged in or not. My next step is to figure out how to pull this off for users who are admins, so that other users (a.k.a. the unwashed public) aren’t privy to the admin link.

Actually, after last night’s adventure, my next step is to go to bed!