Another unfortunate event happened this weekend right after me and bunch of classmates successfully participated in “Escape the room”. I was at a cafe studying with 3 other classmates when I accidentally dumped a cup of hot tea onto the keyboard of my laptop. I rushed it to the Apple Store as if I was taking my unborn child to the emergency room. I was routed over to TekServe and the best they could do was pop out my hard drive. My Iron Man Macbook is no more and I’ve moved onto the new 13 inch retina display Macbook Pro, now dubbed War Machine. I hope this one lasts me another 6 years. As a sidenote, I got a student discount and a NY state tax exemption on my purchase since I’m a web developer. Cool perks. I also spent the entire day today reconfiguring my machine to a usable state so I’m a bit behind. But nonetheless, here is the week 9 recap:

Important Concepts

  1. Take Back Ups - Uh yeah. Kind of obvious, but most people don’t do it. I wasted a whole day setting up my computer so I’m going to be a heavy user of Time Machine from now on.
  2. API Limits - A lot of my projects have revolved using an API to get data, but I realized with our Travel App that we did in the past week that this isn’t always the best idea. Having a dependency on third-party data means that you’re not as agile and have less control over the type of data available. The project we’re taking on in the next two weeks will stay away from that so we don’t depend so heavily on APIs.

Interesting Topics

  1. Design of Everyday Things - This seems like a really intriguing topic. It’s more about physical user interface than digital UI, but still examining human behavior and how to make things more intuitive for end-users.

Useful Resources

  1. CarrierWave – This is an alternative to the Paperclip gem. It will allow you to have users upload files on your website.
  2. Pundit - A gem to assist with authorization in Rails. Meaning you can allow users to access different parts of your website depending on their authorization level.

Inspirational Moments

  1. Student Projects - we had our first “project mode” project this past week. On Friday all the groups presented their web applications and it was amazing to see how much we’ve learned in 8 weeks. There were a lot of groups with apps that have real world application and it’s amazing to see them being created by fellow classmates.

Laundry List

Kind of late for a laundry list since the weekend is already over, but here are some stuff for the upcoming week. 1. Private Pub - Part of the project we want to implement next week consists of creating a chat feature. I really want to understand client/server push/pull in Rails. I heard it kind of sucks in Rails but want to try it regardless before I start learning Node. 2. Side Projects - I have a lot of random side projects that I need to tidy up and put to production. That’ll be a goal for me before the Science Fair in two weeks.

Yup I think that’s it for now. Until next time, happy coding!