My Road to Code

It all comes together on Project Week... Well it turns out that these CodeClan instructors do actually know what they're talking about!  I must admit I may have narrowed my eyes in doubt when they uttered those words, but it turns out they were completely right. Working as a Team We were split up into groups, Team PikaVue (all will become clear) consisted of Myself , Michael Anderson , Chris Kite and Marc Downie .  We were given 4 briefs to choose from, we settled as a team on producing an app that featured a card game.  Specifically Pokemon!  We decided to use the poke api that gave us all 1000+ pokemon, images, moves, health and lots, lots more!  What's in a name? For my non tech buddies (and those who don't have a 10 year old son with a whole folder filled with Pokemon cards) - our team name PikaVue - courtesy of Chris - is a mix of Pikachu (cuddly wee yellow Pokemon) and Vue - the Javascript f ramework we were using to build our app. Agile Working We quickl...

  Promises, promises... That's all we seem to be hearing at the moment, dealing with Javascript's asynchronous nature.  Using a promise means that the app doesn't have to wait for requests to come from the server before running the rest of its code.  If there's a delay in the information we're looking for being sent back from the server this can result in the app hanging if we didn't have a promise to let the rest of the code run.  So what does the promise do?  It effectively says that when the information comes back it promises to do what you wanted with it (ie populate some data) or send up an error if there's a problem retrieving it. Okay, I hear you thinking, but what if you want that data to load up on the initial screen the user sees?  Are they going to be looking at a blank screen while the server and client are having their chat?  No! This is where Vue's mounted hook comes in - you write your promise in there and everything appears when the DOM...

  You spin me right round... Last week I was thrown back into the CodeClan washing machine of emotions!  I think I'm starting to get used to it now...spend 3 days being spun around not knowing up from down while new concepts are being hurled at us from all directions.  Day 4 is spent 'kind of' understanding the concepts and regaining your feet - sometimes with a cheeky extra spin thrown in when you think you've grasped something just to find out that there is yet ANOTHER dimension to it that you hadn't realised.  Day 5 is thankfully the day where you dust yourself down and realise that you DO understand what's going on ... and Breathe! We are about to embark on week 2 of Javascript and I am like a kid in a sweet shop with excitement! Once I had arrived at day 5 last week I couldn't stop, I LOVED weekend homework!  We had to create an HTML form and then create event listeners to display the information for the user once the form was submitted.  Waaay quicker...