MakerSquare Day 56: The short version (12/3)

For those of you who aren't going to make it to the open house tomorrow, I wanted to present a short, bullet-pointed version of things I may talk about. (It's OK, it's supposed to be terribly cold tomorrow, I get it if you can't make it.)

OK, so maybe this is just 15 minutes of me trying to articulate this stuff that I've been working on for a while. Starting with...

About me:

1. My career(s) and interests have taken some left and right turns, though you'll see a lot of themes running through--
2. People: I like working with people, I like working out problems with people in discussion, my dissertation was going to be on groups of people working together. Heck, even improv is primarily around being a good teammate. (And, though this is my professional blog, let's add here that I moved from Chicago to San Angelo, TX because my girlfriend got a job there. That too is about my love of people--or at least my love of one particular person.)
3. I like paying attention to detail--and I can tell you at length how close-reading in literature or paying attention to your improv team is a lot like double-checking your code before shipping it.
4. I like innovation and experimentation and getting better all the time. And here's the part where I kind of have to slag on my grad school experience. Not that English departments don't like innovation in certain ways, but those ways are somewhat limited. (Though, again, I can go on about the digital humanities/big data in literature movements.) But in web development, everyone I talk to has some interesting side project or is learning a new language or BUILDING A NEW FRAMEWORK. In a weird way, web development combines my loves of creation and analysis.

About my Chrome extension:

1. I knew it had to be a Chrome extension since it ran on the back of another site. (Which limits the applicability, but also made it easier to scope the project.)
2. I spent several days of the development cycle home sick, trying to read up on the subject; but as with most things CS related, reading gives you maybe half of the info--it's usually more informative to just get your hands dirty.
3. A Chrome extension is a lot like a regular website in terms of stuff in it--HTML, CSS, JavaScript. (You can even put Angular in! Though that didn't seem like a good way to go for my extension.)
4. But the architecture is very much based on convention rather than configuration: there's a way that things are done and you just have to learn them. So, for instance, content scripts are the only way to affect the DOM, while background scripts are sort of a virtual space where you can pass info from content to the browser itself and the pop-up window.
5. I played around with the omnibox before deciding on a pop-up interface.
6. My biggest difficulty was figuring out how to get it to re-run when new tweets get loaded, until I found out about Mutation Observers, which are perfect and new-ish, since they are objects with special methods for watching for changes.

About my ShareCare app:

1. The idea that I came with, inspired by my experience of sharing responsibility for a dog.
2. (I even tried to set up and send out a survey inspired by my watching of the Coursera course on Human-Computer Interaction. I did not get a lot of responses.)
3. My biggest (first) difficulty was exploring some options for tech stacks to use. For instance, I never used Foundation or Bootstrap before, so I wasn't sure which might be better for styling. (I went with Foundation, which I was moderately happy with, except for some bobbles trying to get Foundation and Rails to work nicely together.)
4. Rails was a lot of fun to work with, in part because it's so smart. You want an AJAX request from a button? Just add "remote: true." You want to separate out your page into modular parts so you can handle each part individually? Let me introduce you to partials.
5. The second difficulty was thinking about how to best design the database. Just a few days ago I realized I could drop one whole table (Claims) and make the same call by just paying attention to the Task table's "completed" and "user_id" columns. (The lesson, as always: Don't make things more complicated than necessary.)
6. The greatest lesson of dealing with a big project like this is the modular approach: break it down, and fix one thing at a time.
7. I probably learned more from this project--both the mistakes and the successes--than any other project.
8. Also, I have a ton of ideas for how to expand and improve this project. Though as it stands, it fits the need I had of passing info between me and my girlfriend about whether the dog's been fed or not.

OK, so that took longer than 15 minutes, but it's going to be mighty cold tomorrow, so some Austinites might not make it out.