Coding Campus : Days 4 – 5

~Friday~

Today was a fun day. We took a break from Django and looked at front end development. Front end focuses on HTML, CSS, Boostrap ( framework ), and Javascript among others. Our focus today was on Bootstrap with a quick HTML/ CSS refresher. We ended up making two Bootstrap styled static websites. The purpose of the first website was to practice our Bootstrap skills and incorporate it with css. The second website was to further our bootstrap skills and add HTML, some css and a few images. I had a good time and it was nice way to end our first week at Coding Campus.

~Thursday~

Thursday was kind of a long day. I arrived at school about a half hour early and left an hour and half later than I normally do to hitch a ride to a GDI ( Girl Develop It! ) meetup. The meetup was interesting. We were all given a dell desktop to take apart and see what is inside a real computer. I took out the memory cards, heating element, fan, graphics card, dvd and floppy drive as well as put them back together. Luckily the women I sat next two encouraged me to keep my pieces organized and that made it so much easier when I had to put them back in the computer. I really wanted to take apart the motherboard but I learned that isn’t something you can do anymore. Motherboards come attached to the computer. It is not something you can install yourself ( bummer! ).

~Actual Class~

As far as what happened in class… We took a quiz in the morning to see what we had learned so far. The quiz measured what we knew about lists and dictionaries, checked to see if we knew how to write out a for loop, asked us to give examples of a field on a model for each data type and to see if we could give examples of three types of Relationship Fields. I’m a champ with lists and did great there I had to think a little bit about dictionaries and made some educated guesses that ended up being right. Dictionaries are very similar to lists. A big difference is that lists include items and dictionaries include keys and pairs. Providing a model for each data type kinda had me confused. For example when the question asked for a integer field type for the model I knew that an integer was a number but I wasn’t sure to do after that. Its actually pretty simple. I had the number part exactly right but the way you code it is state.Integer(). State is your class and .Integer() is your function/field that you use for Django. As far as the relationship fields go I had the general idea. I thought a one to one relationship was a foreign key but a foreign key is really a one to many relationship 🙂 For lecture we went over more views, urls, and templates. I understand views, urls, and templates so I found this part of Django enjoyable. We ended the class with practicing how to make additional views and adding a view to the assignment we had been working on all week.

It’s the weekend!!! Update ya’ll next week!

Coding Campus : Day 3

~Today~

Just so ya’ll know today was a waaaay better day. I felt like I connected with my fellow classmates. We went out to lunch as a class with our wonderful Marketing Coordinator at a local restaurant that serves Pho’ ( I had Spring Rolls 😉 ).After class for Career Prep we had a speaker come and talk to us about Imposter Syndrome. The speaker did a great job and was very relatable with his true life examples. After class I went to the Provo JS users group. There were A LOT of guys. Normally it isn’t weird for me to be the only girl among guys but I have to admit, it was kinda weird. Qualtrics hosted the meetup and I must say it looks like an awesome place to work. I was really impressed(got a sweet swag t-shirt and free dinner from Chick-Fil-A ). I had to leave early so I wouldn’t miss my train ( yeah, yeah blah, blah train ), but I enjoyed the meetup group and wouldn’t mind going again in the future.

~What I’ve Learned ~

This next part is mostly for me. ( So If you don’t want to hear about technical mumbo jumbo you can stop reading ) I’m writing this so I can track my progress and refer back to it in the future… when I’m a high and mighty web developer (ha,ha). To catch you up/me up…

DAY ONE:

Day one was all about introducing us to our file system. Did you know the Unix system is basically a file system? I didn’t until the other day. So I consider myself a Unix user based on the fact I own a Mac and practice web development ( he, he ). We also went over initial setup, which involves setting up the Apapche server, MySQL and phpMyAdmin(I think I mentioned this the other day). I learned that the commands cd ~ takes you to the “home” directory ( user stuff )and cd / takes you to the root directory, which is your root file system. Typically not a place for general( non-web developing) users.I also learned about permissions.I thought those were really scary at first until I reviewed them later and realised that they are pretty cool. For example, if you want to make a file so that everyone can access it, read it, and write it then you would type the command chmod 777 file.txt (whatever your file name is). If you want someone to only read your file then you can type chmod 444 file.txt. I HAVE SPECIAL POWERS TO CHANGE YOUR FILES!!!!

DAY 2:

Day two was the day we set up our first django app( I know I mentioned this yesterday because it sucked!!! )The biggest take away from yesterday was that you have to install django into every project you create. It’s not something that you install once and you are done. The same goes for your virtual environment unless you create a project file that holds the virtual environment and base all your projects out of that directory. So that was kind of sad, mostly because I had installed django on my root system when I was goring through both django tutorials on my own which totally messed up what we were learning how to do in class and is what caused so many…issues. I also learned how to turn the virtual environment on. The command you use to turn it on is workon project(directory) We also learned about the MVC or in django terms MTV ( hell yeah! ). MVC and MTV acronyms stand for model view controller and model view template. They are essentially the same thing but here is how it works in Django. Model is based on models.py, view is the django template and controller is views.py. So basically we are updating 3 or more files at a time for every projects to get a web app going.

DAY 3:

Day three (today ) was about relationship fields and the beginning of the “view”. Relationship fields are fields that don’t contain data but reference data on other models(whaaaatt!!!). I learned the process of inputting info into the database on phpMyAdmin. You do the following when you are making a change to the model: 1) ./manage.py Makemigrations 2) ./manage migrate. You will want to run migrate after to update your database. On a less technical notes, I started to notice patterns and make connections on how to put pieces of the Django code together. For example every time you make a class in model.py you have to make the same classes in admin.py

That’s all folks!!! Until tomorrow…