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 practising 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 the lab was to create a Ruby calculator with a browser front end.

Tuesday - 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 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 were 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 stand up 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, 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.

CODE CLAN WEEK 3 - PROGRAM LIKE EFEN REYS

So I have made it to week 3... Go me! last week ramped up a bit towards the end with blocks and enumerators. The weekend homework task was to create a Karaoke bar which was apt as I was lucky to be staying at the Crieff Hydro for the weekend. Sitting on my Mac in the bar with a beer coding had just the right inspiration and atmosphere. 3 objects were created Room, Guest, and Song. All had to interact with each other and it was fun to play with the objects.

Monday's standup was interesting to hear how my cohorts also enjoyed the homework. The Monday lesson began with a bit of thought for the day and a pep talk for the cohorts to make sure we were having fun and enjoying coding. We should program like Efren Reyes who is a famous pool player. When he makes mistakes he takes them on the chin and laughs them off rather than getting all stressed. So when our code is not working don't stress it, just laugh and work through it. A good mental attitude will help us code better.

This week is SQL week, so in the classroom, lessons introduced us to databases. Lots of CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete). This class was made easier by creating a Star Wars example database. Luckily for me, Jamie (my son age 8) and I watched The Force Awakens in the hotel cinema the night before so I was up on my Jedi.

Tuesday and the 'SQL' homework was summed up during the 9am scrum by a fellow cohort as 'SQ-Hell'.

The homework was a challenge to format SQL queries on a database to retrieve data with Increasing complexity. The last few questions required multiple inner-joined tables! The day progressed with more SQL and introducing Ruby into the mix. Programming Ruby to push and pull data from the database meant that data used in the Ruby programs could be persistent. So we created a Pizza Shop and started passing pizza orders into the database and removing them to an array of Pizza objects. Both Luke Skywalker and Darth Vader placed pizza orders.

In the afternoon lab, we split into pairs to program methods to recover data on the pizza sales and who placed orders.


The homework challenge was to map out the Facebook database structure and identify 'one-to-one', 'one-to-many', and 'many-to-many' relationships

Wednesday and SQL continues to advance; We moved the database calling logic out to its own class and passed it an SQL query as a string... Then placed method calls on the objects using a block to retrieve the data... Check me with all that jargon in one sentence.

Thursday, following the scrum we get a presentation from Cohort6 of the projects they have been working on for the past week. They are 10 weeks ahead of us and were assigned a team challenge last Thursday. A couple of words come to mind: 'Wow!' they achieved that in a week!; and 'PANIC!' we need to do that in 10 weeks?. The brief was to create a raw JavaScript web app. The range of solutions and functionality presented was brilliant. From Dashboards for Astronauts to Munro Bagging tool, to a Disease mapper. I still have lots to learn. Afternoon and it's back into class and we are still in SQL databases, only this time we have moved into the world of Pokemon. The lesson is to create Many-to-Many database interactions, between Pokemon and their Trainers with a Joining Table. The lab was to create our own databases with Wizards and Magical Items. Thankfully Thursday is social night. Some well-deserved beers and a burrito closed off the day.

Friday is standup at 10:00am and the issue of the weekend homework. I've not had it yet but I'm guessing it's SQL databases with joined inner tables with many-to-many relationships...

So to sum up... another great week at CodeClan => still very challenging => but I have some brilliant Cohorts enjoying the Journey with me => Roll on to week 4, where we get to add an interface to our Ruby and Databases.