Week 7 Day 1 - Stop trying to make fetch happen!

Today's partner: Jake

"Stop trying to make .fetch() happen! It's not going to happen!"

I spent all weekend trying to make heads or tails of backbone, and apparently either it paid off, or today's assignment was easy/well composed enough that it was tractable well within the allotted time.

Today's project was the first half of a 2-day project implementing a single-page webapp - a pokedex. (For the unaware, there's a game called Pokemon, and in the game, every time you see a new Pokemon, it's added to your in-game computer index of Pokemans, aka the pokedex… poke poke poke…). The skeletal structure was set up already when we came in, so we started with a rails server with models and routes setup already, and did nothing more than build out the client-side functionality using backbone.

What started in the morning as a static page without much functionality became, by the end, a templated, asynchronous, pretty cool (as these things go) index of pokemans. We didn't accomplish much, all told, except remove a lot of the opaqueness from Backbone models and collections, but given the overall confusion I was experiencing on Saturday it's very much a relief. Backbone isn't that hard, it seems, once you get a handle on the problem it's designed to solve - removing a lot of the drudgework of making an API-driven client-side single-page web-site. But, like Rails, it really merits a cover-to-cover read-through of the source and documentation to understand what is possible, and what's in good taste/style.

Like I've been saying, there are a lot of things I'm seeing that would be incorporated into an eventual portfolio-level project, and since Backbone is the last thing we have to learn to make our projects, I'm thinking that maybe I'm ready to start sketching out what I'd like to accomplish in the next month and a half, starting as soon as I get to the airport Wednesday… I think there will be, and ought to be, a lot of pen-time, hovering over a notebook and essentially drawing wireframes of… what, exactly? I know there are tons of different things I could implement with the skills we've learned, but it's all so daunting now. All the projects I have in mind so far are a bit too large in scope, or too personal/bespoke to merit the effort.

I think.

Hmm. Time to hit people up for ideas.