From Craft to Code

It's official. As of Friday, September the 15th I am an Iron Yard alumni! The next four weeks entail a final project. I will be working closely with a classmate on a project of our choosing. Fortunately for us I already had an idea in mind. Since November of last year I have been a volunteer at the LGBT Center of Raleigh. With my new development skills I proposed helping maintain the site to the web team, Jim Manchester. He came back with the suggestion to do a full page redesign! This is a huge undertaking and one I intend to pour my heart and soul into so the main viable product I can deliver by the end of the four weeks is a high fidelity prototype of the home page. That is just a fancy term for a coded mockup. My project partner Kelly from DesignBright will be in charge of technical writing, SWOT analysis, and market research. As well, she will be a developer and lead designer for the project. We intend to update the LGBT Center's webpage to modern standards, introduce ...

To wrap up our back end instruction The Iron Yard requires a final project that rounds out the skills we've learned over the last three weeks. In a nutshell, we use Node.js and a few of its packages to write an application. Our objective is to create a web app that requires a login and password, allows for registration, enforces password encryption, and brings the user to a home page. For this project, that home page is a code snippet organizer. This project has no mockup or wireframe because design is not the main objective. However, there are a set of abilities our app must have. A user must be able to view all of their snippets, be able to edit or add or delete their snippets, and there must be a search bar that filters through those snippet's tags and languages. That means there are two schemas being used in conjunction. There is a collection of users and a collection of snippets all being stored in the same database. They have to be two separate schemas because each mode...

Last week we covered databases! Super exciting, right? It only makes sense, though, that the majority of back end development would be storing, accessing, and updating data. There are quite a few tools available for Node.js and the ones we covered are Mongo and Mongoose. Mongo or MongoDB itself stores data flexibly. Why does that flexibility matter? It is perfect for sets of data that are incomplete. If I had a list of contacts I wanted to store but I didn't have everyone's emails it wouldn't be a big deal - those email addresses would just be empty. Mongo stores the data and Mongoose is a tool that accesses it for you. This is the secure way to retrieve data and validate it rather than having potentially sensitive information stored right in the code for anyone to see. Mongoose is pretty straightforward to use and I implemented it into my robots database (that thing again!). In a nutshell, I was able to swap out the database I had stored in a file and put it into Mongo o...

There seems to be a lot of debate around what Model View Controller (MVC) is. After almost 48 hours of discussion, intense Googling, and furious debate I believe I can comfortably say that MVC is a way to organize your code. To compare, there are dozens of ways to organize a craft room. On top of those dozens of ways you could think of to organize your stuff - there are overarching theories and methods to help. I've read articles on the psychology of organization and popular methods such as bundling your stamps based on theme versus month of the year you would use it. MVC is a method of organization for programmers. Keep in mind a lot of the implementation is dependent on the project itself. Also, a programmer's code is personal and nothing beats methods that work for that programmer. With that in mind, MVC attempts to propose an ideology to follow. Model can be a folder to store sets of data and any logic used to filter through that data. View's purpose is to hold any vi...