Monday, October 17, 2016

CODE CLAN WEEK 4 - FRANK SINATRA

 

So towards the end of last week, things ramped up with the complexity of the SQL queries:  

 

"SELECT t.* FROM trainers t INNER Join ownedpokemons o ON o.trainer_id = t.id WHERE o.Pokemon_id = #{id};"

 

The weekend homework was of a similar theme so good practice.  This time we had to create a Cinema database, and past customers, films, and tickets to and from Ruby methods.  I had the car with me last week so unfortunately, the drive home was dead time.  Listening to a Ruby Coding podcast made up for this.


I managed the bulk of the homework on Saturday.  The Monday morning 05:43 train to Edinburgh gave me an opportunity to review and add to my homework and move on to practicing Ruby in Code wars

 

Monday - starts with the Scrum at 9:00 followed by a one-to-one review of the homework with an instructor.  It's good to get some feedback on the weekend's work and some pointers on how I could have improved.

 

Classes begin with an overview of the internet and what is really going on when you make a request for a web page.  All good stuff and I now understand what an HTTP: 404 error is.  We were then introduced to Sinatra (Frank Sinatra) which is an open-source front-end framework for Ruby.  A few examples later and the lab was to create a Ruby calculator with a browser front end.

 

Tuesday - and everything is coming full circle and the Pizza app goes online with a code along with the class.  Building on the Sinatra from yesterday we combined the previous week's SQL and made a full-stack web application.  Pizzas could be ordered via a front end and stored in a database and then retrieved. This was hungry work so it was off to Pizza Express for lunch with fellow Cohorts.  The afternoon was a group lab where we were tasked with creating another full-stack application for a shoe shop.

 

Wednesday - and we are introduced to 'Restful Routing' and applied it to our Pizza shop application. This completed the different actions that could be applied to the Pizza shop, by providing Edit and Delete (DESTROY) facilities.  An afternoon paired programming lab let us develop our own record shop application using what we had learned in the morning.

 

Thursday - and following the 9:00 standup we are off into the world of libraries developing an application with many-to-many SQL queries that manage books, members, and how books can be issued.  For this, the number of balls being juggled has risen considerably. Having to develop ruby code embedded into HTML and have it managed by Sinatra and having to think about joined inner tables is getting tricky.  The Afternoon class is an introduction to Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) with instructions on how to improve the style and formatting of our HTML front end.

 

In the afternoon we get issued our first week-long project task. There is a choice of 5 projects that you can choose from and we have till Friday standup to choose from.

 

Friday - 10:00 standup and I'm going with an Animal Shelter (...with a twist) application.  We are encouraged to Plan Plan and Plan on Friday and not do any coding till at least Saturday morning. We will see!

 

So at the end of Week 4 and I'm still really pleased with the course so far. It did ramp up again in difficulty this week, but I seem to be getting used to it now and my brain is taking the strain.