Spring 2012 Project Wrap Up
My spring has been a little less busy on the coding front than Winter was (I did a lot more recording than I expected these last few months). In any case, here are a few things I’ve started.
JavaScript
For one reason or another, I’ve never dug into JavaScript. The most I’ve needed it has been in my Rails projects, where I have continuously struggled when I get to the front end integration. At those times, it seemed like too much to learn at once, so I tried my best to cobble together bits of code so that I could keep moving with the backend.
I’ve realized that if I wanted to do things right, I have to stop thinking that I could just pick up JavaScript along the way and actually commit some time to learning it the right way. I picked up Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts”, which I’ve worked through about a quarter of so far. I’m enjoying its terse style quite a bit.
When I started learning Ruby, one of my favorite things was Ruby Koans. Luckily, I found the similar JavaScript Koans on github, and have been working through that as well.
I’m still unsure of what my end game is right now. Starting with vanilla JS right now seems like a good idea. One of the things that has always intimidated me about JS is all of the frameworks and libraries built on top of it. JQuery is the big one. Then there’s coffeescript. And backbone. Should I only pick these up once I’ve been using vanilla JS for a while and need a way to speed up my workflow?
Another intimidating thing about JS is how much you need to know about the entire browser eco-system in order to be successful in a practical sense.
With all that on the table, I need to know enough JavaScript to get done what I want to get done. Currently, that’s writing Rails apps with enough front end support to succesfully interact with the backend. That will be my goal.
BrightBus
The school year is winding down, which means that app usage will bottom out until August. My goal is to have everything on my bugs and features list completed by then, so that all the new students are guaranteed to have the best bus riding experience possible (and hopefully write good reveiws).
Rails/iOS Music App
I haven’t worked on my music app idea in a while, but I’m excited about getting back on board with this once CJ and I get some time to do some basic planning and strategy about how things should look and function.
Functional Programming
Hacker News is always speckled with good articles about functional programming. I’ve been itching to start learning one, but it’s next to impossible to choose which one I want to start with. As soon as someone writes a blog post about how much better Haskell is than Erlang, there’s always a great rebuttal as to why the opposite is true, and plenty of good comment discussion to sort through too.
At the end of the day, I’m sure it doesn’t matter which one I learn (first). My bigger problem is probably finding a suitable project to implement (and do I have time for another project?).
New Job
I moved into a new role at my day job. I support our (mostly) mechanical engineering team. Once I settle into the role more, I’m hoping that I’ll get more time to write some specialized business apps and get back into active development of the iOS app.