Today was much more productive than yesterday. Our morning lecture was on how to consume an API, which pertained directly to our challenge. The idea is that we’ll take the API that we created yesterday and figure out how to access its database through a NEW site that we create. Most of us didn’t finish the challenge from yesterday, so our teacher took one of the more completed ones and fleshed it out to be useful to today’s work.

It was a little confusing trying to figure out the right calls at first, but once we got rolling, it became pretty obvious. In the future, we’ll be creating sites in much the same way, accessing data from other sources and implementing it directly onto our site. Depending on how often we need to access updated information, it might make more sense to take that data and save it in our own database, but if it is going to constantly change, it’s better to make the necessary requests as often as needed.

We spent the evening preparing for tomorrow’s assessment. We got access to the test that the previous cohort took and tried to go through it as a group, but ended up spending most of our time on concepts that we already understood. I really wanted to focus on AJAX calls, but it required completing several other steps before we had a working prototype that would accept those types of calls.

As it stands now, I know how AJAX works, and I generally know the syntax. I couldn’t build one perfectly the first time, but I could walk you through the steps, at least.

I stayed late again tonight, getting some more functionality into my final project. I also spent some time on some of the other solo projects, but really more as a preparation for tomorrow than anything else.

I don’t know if I’m ready for what’s coming, but until then, I’m Edwin Unger and I’m a web developer in training.