Building ViewFinder (Flatiron - Week 9)

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The majority of this past week was spent building ViewFinder, which is a Rails app that leverages the Instagram API to enable users to guess where photos were taken and gamefies Instagram photo feeds. Building ViewFinder along with Erin Lee and Jesse LaRusso has been a pretty great experience; we got way farther than I had expected initially for the NYC on Rails presentation. Looking back at our Trello board, we defined our MVP for the presentation as an app where users could browse tagged photos and write in the address or intersection where they think the photo was taken. What we ended up with was much more than that, and more visually appealing than I could have imagined initially.

Agile Product Development (Flatiron - Week 7)

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We spent this past week focused mostly on getting our group projects off the ground. We didn’t really have lecture this week; each day was spent pair programming and building our applications using agile development best practices. My group, which consists of myself, Jane Vora, Anthony Wijnen and Ei-lene Heng, is building an app to structure and streamline the process of asking questions in class during group work. The current process of just raising your hand and hoping that a teacher is free is pretty inefficient and awards the lucky students rather than students who have an especially urgent question or have been waiting a long time.

How to Hack Lollapalooza and Still Not Get Tickets

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As a Chicago native (and by “native” I mean a resident of a leafy suburb about 45 minutes away), my secret shame is that I’ve never been to Lollapalooza. Whenever I talk to people not from Chicago about Chicago, they always seem to mention that one time they went to Lolla and had a blast rocking out all night along Lake Shore Drive just a stone’s throw away from the Sears (that’s right, Sears) Tower. Conversations like these tend to end awkwardly when I can’t match their enthusiasm for the premier music festival in my home city.

Flatiron - Week 6

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Today marked the half-way point for the Flatiron program. This past week was heavy on Ruby on Rails instruction; Avi wanted to hammer into us the importance of understanding complex forms and working with multiple, associated models. On Monday, we brainstormed ideas for our final group projects and went through a planning session where we discussed ideas at a high-level - the features, technical obstacles and work sprints that we could tackle within the short timeframe for development.

How to Schedule Tasks Using ‘Whenever’

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In building out my ticket tracker application, I realized that I needed to be able to automatically run scripts at certain intervals throughout the week. I wanted my application to execute a call to Stubhub’s API and pull data on events periodically so that I didn’t have to do it myself each day. In looking on Ruby Toolbox, I came across a gem called Whenever that allows you to quickly and easily schedule tasks using a nifty tool called a cron log.

How (and When) to Use Single Table Inheritance in Rails

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Last week as I was developing an application to track and analyze ticket and event postings, I came across a design problem. I had first started working on my ticket tracker application as a way to parallel the learning that we were doing in class. I started with a simple scraper that pulled data out of the Stubhub’s client-facing HTML documents, then moved on to writing a simple ORM that saved the data to a SQLite database, then moved the application into Sinatra and finally into Rails.

Flatiron - Week 5

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When I started at Flatiron, I set myself a goal of trying to blog every day. That goal pretty quickly fell to the wayside, as I realized how much work would be involved just coding and learning alone. Also, after the first few days, the lessons began to group together in longer, multi-day themes - e.g., Rails. This week, the theme was Javascript/jQuery, which controls front-end user interaction and serves as an intermediate, client-side programming language between the user and the back-end (Ruby on Rails, in our case). Learning JS brought together the whole concept of web development, and it really helped coalesce my understanding of how users interact with web applications and send data to and retrieve data from the application’s back-end.

Flatiron - Week 4

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As I begin the fifth week of Flatiron School, I’m feeling pretty good about where things stand. I’ve been challenged, frustrated and exhausted throughout the previous month, but its been an amazing experience, as I’ve learned more in the past four weeks than I have since college (and probably before college). The workload has been heavy, and I’ve been trying to take on some personal projects on the side. Last week was Rails week, and this week we’re starting to explore front-end web development via JavaScript/jQuery.

Exploring the Black Box (Flatiron - Day 015)

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Technology is often perceived as a black box, an opaque, mysterious tool that somehow performs magic. We take out our phones, press a few buttons, and suddenly we’re able to converse with friends, read books, buy food and learn about pretty much anything. However, as I’ve learned over the past few weeks at The Flatiron School, technology is anything but a mysterious process; its just really good at hiding what its doing. The process of learning how to code is all about not being intimidated or frustrated by the black box, but rather excited to learn about how the black box can seem so magical.

How to Visualize Data With Google Charts for Ruby

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I love data. Specifically, I love data visualizations. Infographics, charts, whatever you call it, if it displays data visually, chances are I’ll want to take a look at it. Data graphics tightly integrate the creative and analytical elements that I find so appealing about programming to efficiently communicate information. If a picture is worth a thousand words, an infographic is worth a thousand pictures. Data graphics can take an array of different forms - charts, 3-D graphs, maps, etc., the possibilities are virtually endless. I wanted to explore data visualization tools in Ruby, starting with basic chart functionality.