This week we had to abandon Ruby for Javascript, and essentially relearn everything we knew how to do in Ruby but in a completely new programming language. Thankfully since the point of Makers is to turn us into language agnostic developers, the programming concepts do translate into another well. So things like objects, functions (methods), arrays, hashes (object literals) still apply — they just look kind of different. Sort of like when you haven’t seen your friend after a couple of years and she comes back, you’re kind of wondering gosh is this still the same person? Actually yes, you just just need to learn what’s up with her and get to know her lingo (the syntax?) — you’ll be best buds in no time again. SO I HOPE.
The afternoon challenge this week was perhaps the hardest yet. Not only do we have to learn a new language, the testing syntax was going to change too. Nooooo — just when I finally cozied up with Rspec! The new tester kid on the block is Jasmine, and while the syntax is quite similar to Rspec, I’m going to have to spend some time getting used to it again… jQuery was also another thing that initially confused me. We basically had to connect our model to jQuery and hook it up to the CSS, then voila — you have a theoretical working thermostat web app with a cute little winter bunny to distract you from what might have been quite a bland looking page, shhh.
Another thing that was actually quite fun to learn was how we could use Ajax to make an API request for weather data, and it would retrieve the appropriate temperature according to the city’s name entered as its query. I foresee many more API related challenges in the near future…
