Turning Down for Angular

Here's my little prelude to the awesome-tude. I had a really great week so I'm working hard to channel positivity and happiness. We're entering the phinal faze here at General Assembly's Web Development Immersive course, and the excitement is tangible. You could cut the tension with a knife. But it feels like a good excitement.

This post is going to focus on a couple things:

1. The third (and group) project by Team Hopper (Lindsey Grimes, Andrew Hogue, and I)
2. Angular and what we've learned about that in Week 10 of WDI.
3. Final Project: Andrew's going silent for a little while..

Project 3

Nozama Books

Woohoo! We did it! Lindsey and Andrew, noted above, worked tirelessly on this app, and we continue to work on updating it to be as perfect as it can be. Our task: create an ecommerce site for famed retail giant, Nozama.com! Our tools: Node, Express, and Mongo.

I think our team did a stellar job, I'm particularly happy with the UI (which can be seen at this link), as that was my main responsibility. We used Materialize to build out the UI, and were particularly happy with the way it worked out. We took bits and pieces from online shopping experiences we enjoyed, and were able to get a really nice-looking interface and flow.

For this project we ended up using the MEN stack (teehee), since we hadn't learned Angular yet, but I wonder how much cooler it could've been with Angular included. I really enjoyed learning the ins and outs of Mongoose, but definitely struggled with the documentation for both Mongoose as well as Express. Mongoose was what we used to generate models for our database, and Express to do a lot of the routing and app middleware (stuff that allows us to create users n' stuff)

The drawbacks:

Unfortunately, we ran into issues with sessions and as of today, we haven't been able to get the shopping cart working. We did some really cool stuff with routing and the integration with the Stripe API, and we can't wait to show it off once it's fully complete. This battle station will be fully operational, just you wait. We're definitely going to focus on that along with our final projects in these last two weeks...

Which leads me to my next train of thoughts departing the station:

Week 10

Angular Madness

This week focused solely on learning Angular inside and out. This was really great, as I've been looking forward to this for a long time, and had dabbled only a little bit in it using Code School's course on the matter. We covered a lot:

• Directives
• Filters
• Views
• Two-way Data Binding w/ Express
• Form Validation
• ViewModel and $scope (this one was really cool because we were taught how to deal with both kinds of issues as they might arise in the workplace)
• Dependency-Injection

Most of these were new or new-ish concepts, but I think the most interesting and difficult one for me to wrap my head round was Dependency-Injection. Finally, after half a day of learning and demos and an entire Code School section dedicated to it, I think I get it:

Dependency Injection:
When you need to use a module or any piece of code that lies outside of your current scope, you end up passing it into the scope by including it in the function's parameters. Basically if you need to use something that isn't right there, you tell your bit of code: "You're going to need some crazy shit we do elsewhere, so you should probably take this with you" as it dives into the function. That way you can use anything from that module inside your function!

Forgive me if that's a really basic understanding, but hey, we don't all start at NASA, folks.

Final Project & Conclusion

So I've tried to give a really rough overview of what we've tackled this week. I definitely feel like I've accomplished a lot inside and outside of class, and I'm really stoked to start on my final project. I've had a few ideas popping in and out of my head for the last few months, and I'm stoked to get to build them from scratch and show off my new skills.

I'm definitely going to do a writeup towards the end, but right now life is full of looking for jobs and trying to make sure I do as much work as possible on my final project. But I promise it's going to be awesome...

Hope everyone had a happy 4th, now let's go get some shit done.

-CL