This week I attended a talk about Design Thinking by Jessica Schomaker, who is a User Experience Consultant at Ingage Partners. Jessica’s approach made the concepts really accessible and it was incredibly thought-provoking.
This week I went to a talk by Catherine Meade of Sparkbox, who discussed GitHub pulls and how to better engage and document GitHub pull requests when working on a team, especially a team that includes people who respond well to different kinds of thinking or information processing (e.g., visual vs. textual). Cat is an engaging speaker and offered a lot of useful resources that we might use to improve our communication and collaboration. She’ll be offering the talk again at CodeMash and JSConf Iceland, and if you’re there you should check out her talk!
For my final project, a single-page React/Redux/Rails web application, I made a trivia game. The Jeopardy fanbase maintains an archive of questions from the famous game show, and, luckily, there’s an API for it! My project pulls data from the jservice API (in the form of questions) and pushes data to my Rails API (in the form of persisted games), both via fetch. A user is able to play a ten-question game and then submit their initials to the record of High Scores. The app is styled with a combination of react-bootstrap and some additional CSS.
Implementing a jQuery frontend on my Volunteer Manager Rails application was in some ways a more complex undertaking than making the application to begin with. To start with, although I’m fairly comfortable with errors, there’s a big difference between fixing something that’s broken and breaking something that’s working and then fixing it! I liked the flow of my application, and adding the jQuery frontend involved a lot of problem creation and then problem solving.
Templates are, at their core, exactly what they sound like: preset structures into which we can insert data. Lodash, a JavaScript library, allows us to create these templates. You can imagine that the Lodash template at its most basic allows you to interpolate data into a structure, and the first examples of templating in the Lodash documentation do just that. A more complex example is how to collect data from a form and then dynamically append that data.