The Rubber Meets the Road

Fund.io Admin Dashboard

So, I'm in the 4th week here at Coder Camps. Time to post on the blog has become scarce, but we're moving forward on the Fund.io Admin Dashboard. Josh Thoyakulathu, my paired programming partner, and I have been working on a Flagged comments page that will be used by Admin users to approve or reject flagged comments from the front-end of the website.

The daily schedule we've adopted is:

• Stand-up meetings to coordinate what we've done and where we're going as a group
• Function writing practice
• Short, focused lectures
• Paired programming 

After that, we're on our own. I'm continuing to use the Pluralsight videos in addition to sites like Microsoft Developer Network & StackOverflow to fill in the gaps and as a goto for finding solutions to problems. Next up, learning how to create AJAX calls to populate our table on the fly. 

The deeper I get into this stuff, the more I realize how much actually goes on behind the scenes. Somewhere, behind all these magically delicious gadgets and gizmos of the web, are lines of code that someone wrote. My hat is off to these wizards. I hope they don't mind me standing on their shoulders.

Bugs Be Gone!

Week 3 has been all about jumping into an existing project, finding your way around the code, and making changes or tweaks in the HTML, CSS, or C# to fix bugs or make things look better. It has been great practice for troubleshooting and getting around in a big application. Visual Studio's Page Inspector tool, as well as the search function of the Solution Explorer have been a big help for me. Working together and individually, we've been able to fine tune some of the features originally built by the two previous troops.

This week I also started working on my personal project, Goalizr. Using Entity Framework code-first, I created my classes and database, and then seeded the database with some initial data for testing. My tables include Goals, Activities, and Emotions. I also needed to create some intermediary classes for GoalActivities and ActivityEmotions, so that I can associate multiple Activities to each Goal, and likewise, multiple Emotions to each Activity. We'll be busy the next few weeks creating the Fundio admin dashboard, but I want to keep working on Goalizr when I have the time so that I can have a solid application in my portfolio by the time I finish camp.

We also had a hiring day on Thursday, where recruiters and potential employers are invited to the school to conduct interviews and give us the opportunity to meet with folks in the industry face to face. I met some top-notch people from companies in the Houston area. One company, Assemble Systems, has a web application product that integrates 3D CAD drawings into an online viewer for Building Information Management. As I get closer to the end of camp, I'll definitely be looking into companies like this that combine CAD & GIS into web-based software solutions. There is some amazing new technology that's being developed right now, and I'd love to be a part of it.

On a sad note, we said goodbye to some of the graduates of one of the other troops. They were a huge help to us these last three weeks, and I wish them the best of luck on their own new career paths.

Team Web Development

As we move into week 3 of the Coder Camps ASP.NET MVC program, we're starting to put all the pieces of the stack together and begin work on our group project. The initial scope of our project was to build the admin area of the Fund.io website. Now, we have been asked to help finish testing and debugging the entire application, in addition to the admin area.

We'll be working as a collaborative development team on this project using Team Foundation Server (TFS). Some of the benefits of TFS are source control, data collection, reporting, and project tracking. The farther I get into this technology, the more impressed I am with Microsoft's suite of development tools. While I've been a long-time user of Windows and Office (and a big fan of their Flight Simulator!), until now I never really saw the amazing things they've been cooking up for software developers over the years.