The final week of Code 201 was essentially a small hackathon: Taking everything you’ve learned (and anything you’re willing to learn quickly), make a project concept, model the domain, and then, as a team, build it. I worked on a team building a Welcome to Seattle web app, answering the first question any potential resident would ask themselves. Where should I live?

Continue reading Code 201 Final Project: Welcome to Seattle →

In week 3 of Code 201, our project was BusMall – think Sky Mall for people trapped on a long bus commute. Something of a familiar issue to Seattle commuters! From the programming end, it was an exercise in tracking and storing data persistently, then using Chart.js to render results. Object constructors, event listeners, randomizing functions, and more… Continue reading BusMall: And you thought SkyMall was bad… →

As a one-day lab in 201, we were given an image of a website and told to go make a design comp in teams of two; basically a day of pair programming. It made me think our instructor really has a pizza thing considering after pizza 3001 we went right into a chocolate pizza design comp. Our task was to replicate an image of a website as best we could. That turned out to be “pretty well” in my opinion! Continue reading One-day design comp →

Our second 201 project was to create a pizza shop. Not just any pizza shop, but Pizza 3001 – A cheese odyssey from the future. I’m not making that up.

At the start of the week, this was an introduction to javascript object literals – lots of them. Copy and paste, change a value, copy and paste, change a value, rinse, repeat. But in just a few days, we went from object literals to constructors and working on the prototype – and from static, predefined data to user-provided dynamic data. Hundreds of lines of manually defined javascript became, well, a lot fewer lines and a whole lot more functionality. It’s almost like they wanted us to learn exactly how valuable constructors are. Answer: Very. Continue reading Pizza 3001: Our Last, Best Hope →

Earlier this month, I took and completed Code Fellows Code 201 – I’m about to start 301 so you know what that means: retrospective post time!

When I told some of my peers my plans to move on from my previous job as a front end developer for a small nonprofit and take some code classes, one of the first questions was “but you have the job, why?” Well, a few reasons. Continue reading Code Fellows Code 201 →