Weekly Update the First

Oh look, a second blog post. That's some rockin' & rollin' right there.

Let's see. When last I wrote, I was committing (ha) to blogging about committing, and I was waiting on a learning schedule from the esteemed SB over at Prime. I was technically not at 100% because of Github's pickiness, but that was okay. It's now been almost a week, so here's what I've been up to!

1. Learning PHP. I'm doing tutorials on Treehouse, and it's been pretty cool. At first I got a little bogged down on the exercises, but what I've decided to do is less following along with the actual coding, and more observing and noting similarities between PHP and the more-familiar Javascript (there are lots). As directed, I have obtained a cookbook and once I'm done with the Treehouse material, I will jump into actual coding. This method (observe now, code later) I think will work better for me in terms of learning and actually maintaining the information.

2. Building an app! This is where the daily commits come in, and I'm still pretty much at 100% (barring the afore-mentioned hiccups). My app is a relatively straightforward full-stack, CRUD operation, similar to our projects at Prime. Express, Node, Angular ... I used SQL because the relational nature made sense, and also for some practice there.  If I decide to deploy it to Heroku I'll post a link to it, but for now here's a brief description.

I'm a librarian (once a librarian, always a librarian), and so's my husband. My daughter, who's almost 6, is a total bookworm. We check out tons of books from the public library, and keeping track of them is kind of a pain. We all have our own accounts in the SPPL system that we can log into and check up on, but I only know mine, and if I want to check on my kid's, I have to look up the information, and blah blah blah. SO, I am building an app that allows me to manually (for now) enter item information, save it to a database, and spit it back out as a full list of everything the family's got checked out currently. When we return an item, it can be removed from the database/list. The last two days I've been working on some fun logic using Moment.js that allows me to change the table row of an item to a different color depending on if it's almost due (yellow) or overdue (red). It's pretty sweet, and I'm kind of pumped about it.

Things I want to do with this app further down the road: conceivably re-write it in another language. Hook it up to a barcode scanning app that will allow me to input the barcode and use that as an item's unique identifier. (I was doing that initially, but it's a pain to type barcodes in by hand, so I switched it out for a SQL-generated ID). In a "Samantha's gone crazy hacker" world, I want to figure out how to use a web crawler (??) to actually log into the SPPL system as each member of my family and actually just pull the data straight from there into my app. But we'll see.  Baby steps, and whatnot.

Combining the learning of a new language with doing old, familiar work (but with some new stuff thrown in) has helped me to maintain an even keel in terms of not feeling overwhelmed or like I'm starting over from scratch and know nothing. Also, it obviously keeps my hand in on the Javascript side.

All in all, a relatively successful week, coding- and learning-wise. Next week I'll hopefully be jumping in to actually coding in PHP, and maybe digging up a new project to start work on, as opposed to continually tweaking tiny things on my library app.

Stay tuned for week 2 shenanigans!