Week Two (+ One Day)

There's going to be a lot less content in this post, as I'm frantically hammering the keys in order to get it out by my deadline of 9PM on a Monday night. Getting closer to the start-of-week goal I've set for myself, but hey, that's how it goes. So here's what we worked on this week:

Monday

CSS & HTML:

Hello darkness my old friend...I remember first starting out with HTML and CSS on Codecademy, the pain felt so new once I dove into it last Monday. Positioning is definitely my weakpoint, so I've been working on finding sites, snippets, and guidelines for making non-crappy code. This was before I looked on Friday for what was scheduled there...spoiler alert: it's bootstrap.

Tuesday

The DOM & jQuery:

I really felt in my element on this one, since I'd already really played around with this before, albeit to an amateur degree. This gave me some time to go over some more advanced stuff and review the things I'd struggled with from the week prior.

Another really cool part of this course is that if we wanted to (and sometimes if we didn't), we could learn about the history of the language, the DOM , and how things used to be. Definitely a good thing to know where development has come from and at the same time get to move towards the bleeding edge.

I also nicknamed the day as "Cinco de Thinko".

Wednesday

SPAs, Namespaces, and Development Cycles:

Not in that order, though, we discussed the development cycle, some best practices, some classics and some newer methodologies and the benefits to each (AGILE to name one). The basic thing we figured out was that the "user stories" were a really good place for writing your basic requirements out and fleshing out your app. We've already started out project (Tic-Tac-Toe), and this was really useful for my processing of where to start with player actions/turns.

Namespaces also made an appearance today, and I understand them a bit better now than when we were introduced at the beginning of the day. Just had to keep at it, I guess!

Cool thing learned: Learned: How to pass a DOM element into another JS function and reference it!

Thursday

Review & Job Stuff:

Today was crunching on what we'd learned that week, applying what we could to our project, with an interlude into the Boston Startup Community and what kinds of jobs were out there. We also worked with Scope and Immediately-Invoked-Function-Expressions (IIFEs), which I immediately threw into my Tic-Tac-Toe app (TTTapp).

Friday

Bootstrap, Templates, and Handlebars:

We learned a lot about bootstrap in the morning, but the rest of the day was really spent organizing my code for TTTapp, and implementing bootstrap for simplicity's sake! I also had a great idea of a webapp: Basically it would be a scrollable timeline for characters and events during A Song of Ice and Fire. I really like that idea, and might look more into it if I can find a high-enough quality map of Westeros (god knows I probably couldn't include the other locales yet).

Summation

I worked my butt off this week, but I'm feeling super confident in what I'm going to get out of the program, especially if I keep putting in the hours. I really want to grow to be able to help others as I progress, as I'm not always super social. For all you WDI-BOS-07'ers reading this: I'm trying to be friendly, but I'm super bad at joining activities, so I'm working on it, OK?!

Love y'all, making progress,
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