Wednesday, December 9, 2020
The Final Lecture and Bats Full of Shame
Monday, November 16, 2020
Capstone 3: FATALITY!
Howdy, friends!
We have completed another capstone! This one focused on creating a RESTful API, SQL, and user authentication. It was an application similar to Venmo in which users can send, receive, and request money.
After the capstone, we focused on HTML and CSS for week 9. This was nice because I have a lot of past experience with these and it was more like review. Capstones leave everyone exhausted and it can be hard to focus on new material when you've been coding for 12+ hours for several consecutive days. It felt like a refreshing break, but I still learned new things! I had never made a CSS grid before. I had also been self-taught, so I didn't realize you could use HTML for the structure of the page and do all of the styling with CSS. My previous pages looked nice, but they were inconsistent in how I styled them, which makes the code harder to read and can create problems later on.
I've decided I definitely prefer front end development to back end. While both are enjoyable, I have a lot of fun designing sites and making them aesthetically pleasing, which I know is ironic because my blog is very plain. We used to have a saying when we were young and mean in college: "Ugly girl, heart of gold, bless her soul." That is my blog. Unattractive, but the content is quality (I hope!).
If you're wondering about the "bless her soul" bit, it's because my friend group had noticed that some people tack that on to whatever horrible thing they said about someone else, as if that magically makes it okay. Also, the ugly girl could be anything: an unappealing, yet amicable dog or a particularly grotesque cucumber at the supermarket. It never failed, upon viewing such a spectacle, someone would mutter "Ugly girl, heart of gold, bless her soul" and we'd all bust out laughing.
We came up with that phrase one night at Tee Jaye's. Sometimes, I miss those late nights laughing around a table and filling up on gray food. I was especially fond of the Barnyard Buster, two eggs over-easy on a pile of home fries and split biscuits. The whole mass was then smothered in "sausage" gravy, which often tasted only of flour. It was basically Heaven.
Perhaps I am feeling nostalgic because in the wake of COVID-19, the idea of sitting in a restaurant with friends seems unlikely to occur any time soon. On the bright side, I do feel grateful for technology like Zoom, which enables us to see and hear our loved ones in real time. That's part of why software development is so exciting to me; I like the idea of making things that enhance people's every day lives. If a program can take a bit of the burden off of an individual, that's a beautiful thing.
Thursday, October 29, 2020
Capstone 2: Dead and Done!
Hello, all!
I haven't posted much because I was busy working on my second capstone for module 2. It was incredibly stressful, but my partner and I created something we are very proud of.
Module 2 was fairly short and deceptively easy at first, but the last few concepts came in like a roaring lion and knocked me back a few pegs. Here is what we covered:
- Introduction to databases
- Aggregate functions and group by
- Joins
- Insert, update, and delete
- Database design
- Database connectivity
- Integration testing
- Database security