Mid-week Checkin

Posted on Oct 6, 2016

It’s Wednesday night and as expected it’s been both an exhausting and rewarding week so far here at the Front End Web class. Here is the table of contents we’ve been working through:

Introduction
Chapter 1: Setting Up Your Development Environment
Chapter 2: Setting Up Your First Project
Chapter 3: Styles
Chapter 4: Responsive Layouts with Flexbox
Chapter 5: Adaptive Layouts with Media Queries
Chapter 6: Handling Events with JavaScript
Chapter 7: Visual Effects with CSS
Chapter 8: Modules, Objects and Methods
Chapter 9: Introduction to Bootstrap
Chapter 10: Processing Forms with JavaScript
Chapter 11: From Data to DOM
Chapter 12: Validating Forms
Chapter 13: Ajax
Chapter 14: Deferred and Promises
Chapter 15: Introduction to Node.js
Chapter 16: Real-Time Communication with WebSockets

And what’s up next:

Chapter 17: Using ES6 with Babel
Chapter 18: ES6, the Adventure Continues
Chapter 19: Introduction to MVC and Ember
Chapter 20: Routing, Routes and Models
Chapter 21: Models and Data Binding
Chapter 22: Data: Adapters, Serializers and Transforms
Chapter 23: Views and Templates
Chapter 24: Controllers
Chapter 25: Components
Chapter 26: Afterword

Entering the class I was a little worried that my past web development experience would have made the early chapters moot, but to my enjoyment there is a lot of new web features and tools available since I did Rails full time back in 2012. Flexbox is particularly interesting and has me excited to do some testing to see if it will help me solve some layout concerns I have in my side project.

I also enjoyed the time we’ve spent working in pure JavaScript. We built out a very modularized system that would react to a simple coffee order page. I appreciate how we’ve taken the time to learn JavaScript from the bottom up. It makes you better understand and appreciate what more advanced tools like Babel and Ember are doing.

Tonight we closed with web sockets which is something I’m really hoping to embrace on future projects. Live content, no reload and real-time collaboration is where it’s at.

And then of course comes the “ranch” venue itself. Being able to get away and focus on the learning is priceless. Afternoon walks help clear your head. Here are some photos. Wish you were here. 🙂