Notes from Forward JS

AKA baby’s first JavaScript conference

I’m not the hugest fan of JavaScript, so how did I find myself at Forward JS, a JS conference? Well, I’m on a number of email lists,and last week Girl Develop It was offering a great discount for Forward JS – $19 for the one day conference (no workshops), down from the original price of $249. I do love a bargain, and I figured that I would learn something, so I impulsively purchased a ticket.

The event took place at the Regency Ballroom. I think I saw CocoRosie play here a long time ago. One guy I talked to mentioned that he had his high school prom at the Regency. They do everything!

I tried to hit up as many talks as possible, but I got tired as the day wore on, and left before the afterparty.

Here’s what I saw:

How Your Brain is Conspiring Against You Making Good Software

  • Jenna Zeigen, Engineering Manager @ Digital Ocean
  • The keynote was pretty interesting. It was all about cognitive biases and how they affect development – from building teams, to coding to project planning. It pushed for greater diversity and inclusion, which seemed to be a theme of the conference.

IMG_3734

Forward themed tampons! Yeah diversity! There were a lot more female attendees than I was expecting, and maybe half of the speakers I saw were women. It felt really good, and positive.

Coffee break – Coffee & Stroopwafels – Apparently last year they promised stroopwafels and there were none? They were delicious. Various tech companies had booths set up in the social hall, and I ended up learning about some cool technologies like IBM’s ez API builder, API Connect.

IMG_3735

Bringing Dynamic Back

  • Raymond Camden, Developer Advocate @ IBM
  • This session was all about finding ways to make your static site more dynamic. I gave static a try with Jekyll and didn’t end up sticking with it, but this talk was still pretty helpful.

There’s a Bookmarklet for That!

  • Justine Lam, Web Developer @ ShareProgress
  • This talk was a lot shorter and more straightforward than I was expecting. I think it finished in 20 minutes when there were 40 minutes scheduled. Justine made bookmarklets look easy, so I’m working on my first one. It’s a bookmarklet to replace all images on a webpage with photos of Bill Clinton playing with balloons. I call it “Billoons.”

IMG_3740

Lunch Break

React/Omniscient and Immutable – the Gateway Drugs of Functional Programming 

  • Erin Depew, Front End Engineer @ Bit.ly
  • This one was incredibly popular, probably because it was about React, but also because it was held in the room where lunch had just ended, and there were so many people already seated that maybe they just decided to stay?
  • I got to see how Bit.ly uses React along with Omniscient and Immutable, and all the challenges they’ve run into along the way. I haven’t used React yet, but the talk was easy to follow. There wasn’t much emphasis on functional programming, which is what I was expecting from the title.

IMG_3742

React Native: Learn From My Mistakes

  • Joe Fender, Senior Developer @ Lullabot
  • Another React talk (there were 4 total), things to consider when using React. I had a harder time following this talk. Guess it’s time to learn React!

IMG_3755

Practical Performance Tips to Make your Cross Platform Mobile Apps Faster

  • Dr. Doris Chen, Senior Technology Evangelist @ Microsoft
  • I was excited about this one. It was basically tips and tricks for speeding up your apps. She was trying to condense an hour talk into 40 minutes so she didn’t quite make it to the end, but it was still enjoyable. One of the better tips: you don’t have to put event listeners on everything, just set it on the parent, and let bubbling up take care of that for you.

IMG_3756 2

Coffee Break – Milk & Cookies

By the time it was cookie time, I was exhausted. While I could have checked out another hour or so of lectures, I decided that it was a good time to call it quits. Overall, I’m really happy that I went. I met some interesting people, and the energy was good. Everybody, male/female, young/old was there to learn. Do I like JavaScript any more than before? I don’t know. It’s a useful language, that’s for sure.

 

Refactoring Hangry!

Oh my. It’s been a while since I blogged here. Well, first off the good news: I graduated from my program! The bad news? Well it’s not really bad news, but damn finishing was tough!

Remember how I said the key to getting through these LV assessments was to keep it simple, hit the project’s minimum technical requirements and then jazz things up? During my Angular assessment I received lots of great suggestions for improving Hangry!

Actually, they weren’t really suggestions. They were more like additional requirements for me to graduate, which was annoying, but I understand why the instructors would want to push us harder on our last official project. To be honest though, I was pretty mentally and emotionally zapped by that point, and it was disheartening to see the finish line moved at the last minute. I took a day off to clear my head, and then I was ready to get back into it.

It took me about a week and a half to add in these refactors. They all are aimed at flexing more muscles with Angular. There’s of course always more work to be done, but here’s what I’ve added:

Angular has a few directives that are useful for cleaning up your code:

The original error messages around my form validation for adding a new restaurant were built with ng-if, which quickly became messy. I switched over to using ng-messages, which was quick and easy. I just had to install ngMessages with bower, add ‘ngMessages’ in to the array of app requirements, and then I was able to use them straightaway in my form template. The actual code when using ng-messages still took up a fair amount of space, but things were much more readable.

I created a custom directive to contain the visual representation of a restaurant result on the index page. The resulting directive <restaurant-result></restaurant-result> made things a lot cleaner and semantic in my code. What’s loading here? A restaurant result! One thing that stumped me for a minute was the naming of my directive. Because of how Angular converts names, calling the directive RestaurantResult was incorrect. You have to name it in camel case (restaurantResult) in order to get Angular to convert the directive correctly to <restaurant-result>.

File Structure

With the increase in complexity to my app, I thought that it made sense to move over to Angular’s way of organizing your file structure by feature. So, instead of having folders just for controllers, views, directives, etc… I had folders for “restaurants” and “reviews.” I got it a bit wrong at first, however, in that I included components with objects. So “nav bar” for example is included at the same level. I still need to go back and clean this up.

Authentication & Devise 

Another suggestion was to implement authentication. Allow people to register for accounts, log in and save information to their accounts. To be honest, I was actively avoiding authentication during my first go round with setting up my assessment project. I’d read a few too many horror stories online, and just looking into tutorials the approaches for making Angular + Devise + Rails work together were all over the place.

With the major bits of my app in place, I went ahead and decided to give it a go, using Devise. First I installed it on the Rails side with the Devise gem, and then I bower-installed the Angular-Devise service for interacting with Devise.  I ran into some initial issues with handling the user’s authenticity token, but for now, a user can register, log in and log out. One bug: Devise flash messages don’t show until you refresh the page. This is because I set up my flash messages incorrectly. They should be handled by Angular. I’ll need to go back and fix that as well.

Other improvements seemed to be creeping this project more and more in the direction of Yelp: 

Another functionality that seemed like an obvious improvement was adding on the ability for users to review restaurants. Once users reviewed restaurants, that restaurant would be added to their dining list, a list of places they had visited before. Adding reviews was simple enough- I set them up as a join table between users and restaurants.

Since reviews were for restaurants users had visited, I also added on the ability for users to filter results to see only restaurants they’d never been to.  This filtering was accomplished on the Rails side with a class method.

As I mentioned in my previous post, I was looking into integrating Google Maps functionality on my Restaurant show pages. There are ways to do this without Angular (ahem, jQuery), but this was a good time to try out the popular Angular-Google-Maps. Just you know, trying out the most Angular that I can.

Even following the QuickStart guide line by line, I ran into some bumps, but Avi worked with me for quite a while and we managed to get things running. The major things that got in the way were loading Lodash and where I was adding my $scope.map object. My map was meant to be shown on the show page, which was handled by a showController, but my $scope.map was added to a mapsController. I was planning to have multiple controllers on the show page, which was unnecessarily complicated. Once I just moved the $scope.map over to the showController, it just worked.

Seeing the maps populated, I breathed a sigh of relief, but there were still a few more steps to go to actually implementing these map directives. I had to geocode the restaurant’s address. I ran into issues accessing my address data, but that was because I needed to account for accessing the data from the $resource $promise. The last hurdle: getting the place marker to show up. The code itself was simple enough, I just had problems with when the expression was being run. That was fixed with $evalAsync(), which is in the same family as $scope.watch and $scope.apply.

Next Steps:

The work is never done, is it? There are so many things I want to do to fix up Hangry!. Still it’s a relief to officially close the book on my program. I’ve already started job hunting, and it’s overwhelming as well, but that’s another blog post. 🙂

Rails + Angular Project: Hangry!

Here we go! This is my last assessment for Learn Verified. To finish off the AngularJS section, we were tasked with creating a single page app, with an Angular front-end, and a Rails back-end.

Specific Requirements Included:

Angular

  1. Must use an Angular Front-End that includes at least 5 pages
  2. Must contain some sort of nested views
  3. Must contain some sort of searching as well as filtering based on some criteria. Ex: All items in the “fruit” category, or all tasks past due
  4. Must contain at least one page that allows for dynamic updating of a single field of a resource. Ex: Allow changing of quantity in a shopping cart
  5. Links should work correctly. Ex: Clicking on a product in a list, should take you to the show page for that product
  6. Data should be validated in Angular before submission
  7. Must talk to the Rails backend using $http and Services.

Rails

  1. Backend created with JSON that accepts and stores the data for Angular

Project

Based on my experience with past assessment projects, I knew that I shouldn’t go too fancy. Get the project working to hit the minimum requirements, THEN have fun with it. Since the last several projects I’ve done were variations of CRUD apps (CRUD in Sinatra, CRUD in Rails), I decided to do another CRUD app, this time to see the way Angular likes to do things. I also knew that I wanted to work with the Yelp API.

So my app allows you to CRUD restaurants (well CRU for now, I didn’t care to add Delete as it seems like something you’d only want an admin to do, and I don’t have roles added yet…). New restaurant information is validated using Angular form validation. Restaurants on the restaurants index page are populated to the page with ng-repeat, and you can filter your results by searching by name or city with the filter directive. You can also search the OpenTable API for restaurant suggestions (ng-resource). On the home page the search results are nested, using UI-Router.

Code on GitHub Here

Here’s the walkthrough. I forgot to show the form validations, but they are there!

Issues & Notes About This Project / AngularJS / My Program

So, I mentioned in my last assessment that my program’s curriculum seemed a bit lighter on the JavaScript and jQuery sections. Unfortunately, it only got worse with AngularJS. This was easily the weakest section of the whole program, and unfortunately it was at the very end, when my patience was at its lowest. I felt like I was adrift at sea during the Angular section, and the dearth of lectures for Angular was frustrating.

One of the best parts of the LV curriculum is how each topic seemed to build logically on top of the previous topic. It really helped with comprehension. The Angular section on the other hand…. the lessons were like “HEY! Look at this cool shit Angular can do! SO COOOOL.”  And then the next lesson would be “Hey look at this other random thing Angular can do. HA ha!hAAA Angular is so cray you guyz.” The underlying framework of how everything fit together just didn’t really feel like it was there. Even more annoying was the fact that the lessons actually said things like, “See isn’t that easy? Angular is so simple!”

NO. No it’s not easy. This is exploding my mind. SHUT UP.

Honestly, this cartoon really captures the emotional rollercoaster of AngularJS well.

angularjs

Anyways, thank the coding deities that I listened to my classmates and chose to buy Tony Alicea’s very popular Learn and Understand AngularJS Udemy course. It almost didn’t happen, because I’m cheap, but yeah, I really was that desperate. I even bought it with a Udemy coupon that was ONLY 40% off. Whatever happened to those 99% coupons? I miss those.

The Udemy course helped a lot, however you know, it still took a while for my mind to really get it. Checking out as many resources as possible is what helped me piece things together.

ANYWAYS, this is all to set up my mindset at the time of starting this project. I should also mention that I was starting to get stressed about money, and really needed to finish things up. So I was frustrated and broke. Okay, a little overdramatic, but you get the idea.

Technical Issues

It took me a while to figure out how to rig up Angular to work with Rails. I looked at a variety of sources, and this tutorial was rather helpful.

Conceptually I got how things were connected, but while creating this app I kept tripping myself up with the naming of my controllers. They were too similar, and I made a blunder in my code referencing the incorrect controller. This single mistake cost me an entire day to ferret out.

Another major pain point was working with Yelp. Yelp is my go-to site for planning all of my meals out, and their API looked promising. Alas, it was a pain in the butt. I spent a good 2-3 days trying to make Yelp work, even looking into their gem. Then I stumbled upon a thread from 2012 where people were complaining about Yelp removing its API documentation for JavaScript. Uh… like 4 years later and it’s still nonexistent. I took that as a sign that I should move on. Angular was going to be hard enough, I didn’t need to stall on an API. Thankfully I found the Unofficial OpenTable API. It didn’t have the richness of data that Yelp offered, but it is simple to query and requires no API keys. Hallelujah!

My last major hurdle was getting Bootstrap to work with AngularJS (it gets funky because of jQuery). I ended up just using the CSS, and that worked fine.

Next Steps

I’d like to integrate Google Maps into the Restaurants show page, and it would be great to get that Yelp API hooked up as well.

This is my last project and assessment for my program, so it’s time to start job hunting!I’m going to try to keep the momentum going on my learning, though. I’m going to be working through the algorithm and project sections of Free Code Camp, Harvard’s Intro to Computer Science course CS50 , and Mackenzie Child’s design and Rails courses. If you know of any back end junior dev  jobs, let me know!

Scroll To Top