Week 7 in Review

Didn't get anything (app-wise) presentable to the world out this week. However, I did finish off a bunch of loose-ends at my freelance jobs and such, so I'm feeling pretty good about that. Just a quick round-up. I'll have a longer blog post about other topics soon.

• made a lot of changes to the library site code... mostly refactorings, but also fixed some bugs
• another freelance project is coming to the end; it feels good to be in the home stretch
• SaaS - no homework this week, just a pretty extensive quiz that I didn't do very good on. The topic is design patterns, and I feel like it would be better as a homework assignment so we could actually practice them rather than quiz questions, because patterns are already such abstract concepts, it's hard to answer questions about them without tying them to a real app. I had a lot of trouble with the wording and terminology of many of the questions. I feel like I understood the concepts pretty well, but the wording always gets me to pick the wrong thing. But the bigger picture, that of design patterns, was still very useful, and is one area that I'll need to get better at (both recognizing when to use them and actually implementing them well)
• My resume. I'm still working on my portfolio site when I can find a spare second, but until it's done this resume will be my face on the job market. It was made in JSON Resume (an open source solution). Fellow #codenewbie Jonathan told me about it, and it's really saved me a lot of time by separating the presentation layer from the content (which is coded in JSON).
• Rails API + Ember - I worked on following this tutorial which is pretty straight forward, although probably not written for Rails newbies. There were a few things it did where I felt happy that it worked without knowing why it worked. Going back over it, I feel like I understand the main concepts well, but the details would be hard to reproduce in another app without following each step over again.
• I started a #codenewbie Code Club on making pull requests. Code Club is a great one-hour study session where we tackle a problem (doing a pull request in this case) and teach each other. We went through this helpful article on doing pull requests as well as putting what it said into practice on my Exquisite Source repo on github.