General Assembly WDI, Week 10

Hungarian folk dancers and Hugo.

Day 45

Monday was “Computer Science Day,” which put me squarely in one of my happy places. One of my favorite things in all of Boston is the Bean machine at the Museum of Science, which illustrates the central limit theorem (specifically, the law of normal distribution, aka a bell curve):

Searching & sorting algorithms (which, along with data structures, were the primary topics of the day) tickle that same space in my brain, and come with even more fun videos. Some of my favorite resources for learning about those algorithms, and by extension Big O notation and time/space complexity:

For the data structures portion of the day, we split into groups and each researched a single structure, then presented to the class. My group had linked lists, which are really fun to draw on the board (but maybe not as much fun as tries). Some good resources for learning about these:

  • The CS50 week 5 notes and the “Data Structures” section of the study guide
  • The Wikipedia articles on the major types we covered (lists (including primitive arrays, stacks, and queues), linked lists, associative arrays, trees, graphs, and tries) are pretty good. Wikipedia also has an extensive list of data structures.

Days 45-47

We kicked off Tuesday morning with a giant brainstorming session. The prompt: what technologies and related issues have we not yet covered? It was a long list, and not nearly exhaustive. The goal was to provide starting points for our next assignment: a 15-minute presentation on a topic of our choosing.

This was fun. And overwhelming. And fun. My brain jumped immediately to things I’ve worked on or heard about at Berkman—digital security, Internet censorship (which one colleague chose for her presentation—I was excited to point her to the OpenNet Initiative and Internet Monitor!), Elasticsearch, Kibana, PGP/GPG. I decided to go a completely different direction for my presentation, though, and chose to talk about setting up a code blog with Hugo.

I’m a little behind (only now writing about Week 10 of 12, even though I finished the program in mid-November), but I’ve been doing my best to blog about the code I’m writing and the concepts I’m learning since starting the Web Development Immersive program. I think it’s one of the best things I’ve done for myself as a developer. I’m not always as clear or concise as I’d like to be, but going back through my notes, attempting to distill concepts, and giving myself a second chance to dig into anything that was confusing or particularly intriguing the first time around has helped me retain information, get feedback from others inside and outside of the program, and test my own understanding.

Why Hugo, specifically? Mostly because I’m getting a bit frustrated by WordPress’s bloat and would like to see if I can make the experience of blogging and browsing a bit faster. Jekyll was my first thought, given the size of the community (huge), its connection to GH Pages (which I’ve used for the last four of my public projects), and its use of Ruby (a language I’d like to get better at), but Hugo won me over for its speed argument alone, given that I’d like to port over this blog, which has over a decade’s worth of content. I haven’t yet gone through the process of exporting all of my content to markdown/comments to Disqus and importing them into a Hugo site, but it’s on my to-do list. In the meantime, I put together a quick presentation/tutorial about how to get started with a very basic portfolio site (above) and managed to spark interest in a couple of classmates, which was exciting.

Day 48

I don’t have enough exclamation points to convey my excitement about CLIENT SIDE ROUTING!!!! One of my frustrations throughout the program has been that all of our single page apps only handle/offer a single URL. Want to share a Go Bag packing list with a friend? Nope. Want to send around your Happening event invitation? Nope. Finally getting my hands on (one of) the (many) tools to solve this problem felt so good.

Some basics, if you’re unfamiliar with client side/front end routing: A lot of people are building “single-page applications” these days, which load data dynamically, behind the scenes, as the user interacts with them. The page is never reloaded in the web browser, which makes the user experience a bit faster/more seamless. Because you’re only working with a single web page, you also only have (by default) a single URL. You can check out my packing list app Go Bag for an example of this—logging in, signing up, creating a packing list, editing items, and viewing different lists all happens at https://rhjones.github.io/go-bag/. This is a bummer: what if you want to share a list with a friend? Or send them directly to the sign up page? Or (wait for it) use the back button in your browser? None of this works “out of the box” with a single page application.

Enter: client-side routing, which solves this problem by mapping different parts of a single page web application (like a single packing list, or the view that lets you create a new list, or the log in form) to different URLs. Suddenly, you can bookmark URLs! Share them! Go back and forth between them using the buttons in your browser! It’s like having your single page application cake and eating it, too.

There are larger front-end frameworks that will handle this for you, but we dipped our toe in the water using Router5. We started with a simple HTML page with three divs and a nav bar with three matching links. Each link was tied to an event handler that, when a user clicked the link, would add/remove a “hidden” class to the appropriate divs to “swap out” the desired content. Along the way, the URL never changed.

Using Router5, we refactored this code to instead define a series of routes that matched the previous links and register a series of URL paths based on the internal anchor links. Clicking on one of these links now uses the navigate method of Router5 to navigate to a specific route (i.e., change the URL and execute code associated with that route). We also defined a middleware function that is executed on each transition between routes. This function takes care of adding/removing the “hidden” classes to display the content associated with each route. Ta-da! Functional, shareable URLs that map to specific pieces of a single page JavaScript application.

The goal here was to demonstrate, very simply, how client side routing works and to familiarize us with the concept of associating specific view states with different routes in preparation for working with Ember, which we covered in Week 11. Ember uses Router.js, not Router5, but the principles hold.

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