Mid-week Checkin

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. 🙂