Posts from 31 December 2014
-
Today's partner: Ben
Another Backbone day, another day thinking that I know enough about Backbone already only to realize there's a lot to know. Once again, the book they have assigned is a great resource, and really backbone (and rails, and some other technologies) deserve a full read-through in order to understand what they have to offer.
Maybe that will be one of my priorities in the new year.
Resolutions:
- Get a job
- Actually read Backbone Annotated Source
But then again, talking around the water cooler, I keep hearing that other frameworks are much more …expressive? than Backbone. You'll always remember your first, but I shouldn't really pigeonhole myself as someone who's only willing to learn one framework… even though I haven't really learned it, yet.
In any case, it nice to get some depth. The topics feel much faster paced lately compared to Ruby/Rails, and I really am chomping at the bit to move on, but this time isn't being wasted. Especially not for the class as a whole—pair programming continues to yield educational benefits, due to cross pollination and so forth.
Our app today was a simple news reader. The coolest thing was using a gem, SimpleRSS, to pull live rss data from various sites around the web. I'm sure that we didn't do any more queries than any other random people during the day, but (for instance) while we were testing the reload button, I did feel a twinge of guilt for smacking their servers around lightly. It's weird to be using real data and not Yet Another Sample Set, because it's a reminder that we're not just messing around.
Hopefully the New Year finds a couple of us working on Real Problems™ with Real Data™… no matter what, we'll all be up to our ears learning for some time …