Overview

• Preliminaries.
  • Admin.
  • Upcoming Work.
  • Extra Credit.
  • Questions.
• Debrief on learning from alumni.
• Brief demos.
• Group work time.

Preliminaries

Admin

• Weekly reports (to me and to all four alums)
  • What did you plan to do this week?
  • What did you spend your time on this week?
    • Yes, you need to write down things like "I spent two hours following this Ruby Tutorial before realizing it was for the wrong version of Ruby."
  • What obstacles made it difficult for you to move forward?
  • What do you plan to do this coming week?
  • What help do you need for this coming week?
  • Anything else of interest.
• Check ins!
  • When are your scheduled meetings with your community partners?
    • Grants: Forthcoming.
    • Resource Guide: EM tomorrow (hopefully). DW or JA next week.
    • Notifications Team: Forthcoming.
    • Board Bank: Forthcoming.
    • These can be during class time (after 2pm)
    • With advance notice, SS can get you transportation. (SR may be able to provide transportation in the mean time.)
  • When are your scheduled meetings with your mentors?
    • Grants: 5pm on Sunday
    • Resources: None yet.
    • Notifications: Every Thursday at 2pm
    • Board Bank: Two-week, related to iterations. Thursday.
• We'll take a quick look at the schedule.
• For the second half of today's class, you will be in workgroups and Nora and I will be wandering around thing to help. (I may stop early to make sure that my talk is ready.)

Questions

Debrief on learning from alumni

• Metrics for success.
  
  • You will be successful if you have learned something and can communicate what you have learned.
  • You will be successful if you have a better idea whether or not WebDev is something you want to pursue in the future.
• Rails follows an MVC framework.
• Thinking about databases and table relationships (forthcoming in 321)
  • Understand functional needs of your program
  • From that develop tables.
  • Think about the different kinds of relationships: 1-1, 1-many, many-many. (Ask the Resouce Guide group for how to model these).
• State machines are interesting. (Although not necessarily for this project.) But it's also useful for general analysis of software as you build or understand someone else's software.
  • Idea: Things can be in multiple states and there are transitions between states with associated actions.
  • Example: Vending machine. Initial state is "No money". Adding a coin converts it to "some money". Adding enough coins converts it to "enough money to buy a product", so it enables various "purchase" buttons. Purchasing has additional effects.
• UX analysis through a particular role (e.g., reviewer, applicant, admin). Reviewing the completed user stories by interacting with the app, may possibly generate new user stories.
• Particular project issues (e.g., Paperclip + Dropbox)
• The importance of products like Trello to manage projects online.
• More details of project - e.g., the database design.
• The ActiveAdmin Gem makes it easier to add administration privs for a Rails app.
• Rails makes things easy, but chasing Rails/Ruby updates is a PITN.
• TDD!
• Version control is important! Use it! Branches are your friends.
• RFC2616 - Know HTTP.

Brief demos

Group work time.