Today was action packed, which of course means that not much real work was accomplished. With Friday morning check-in, Phase 3 final project presentations, and Phase 3 graduation, we weren’t left with much time to work on our Phase 2 final projects before it was time to present. Luckily, I was already finished with mine before the day’s festivities began. I still wanted to add AJAX functionality to it, but that turned out to be a minor step that I was able to figure out with the help of a few people.

I didn’t have high expectations of animating my app with beautiful jquery and AJAX calls, but I did want to be able to submit a quiz question without reloading the page. After a few issues where the app would submit the answer for the same question 10 times, we got it working properly.

The Phase 3 final project presentations were pretty amazing. There was a drone app that took advantage of recording features, a ‘Tinder’ for visiting places, and even an app that lets passengers in the backseat have control of the music playing on the radio. It was really impressive to see that most teams went with either a mobile-first build, or chose a completely new language to work in. I’m really excited to see what our team comes up with in a few weeks.

Speaking of which, I found out that I’m moving on to Phase 3. After learning that everyone else had the same discomfort with AJAX as I do, I wasn’t surprised to be continuing on, but I definitely want to get more comfortable with AJAX before we come back to it.

In the afternoon, we had our Phase 2 final project presentations. I was pretty proud of what I’d made, mainly because I knew everything worked and I had implemented everything that was required, including two APIs, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript, and plenty of Sinatra. The app is called Recog-A, and it’s meant to be for Alzheimer’s patients. The idea is that a user can take a quiz that’s been created for them by their caretaker or loved one, and that quiz will include photos of people the user should know or places that the user has visited. They must try to choose the right option from multiple choices. At the end of the quiz, they’re given their score and the correct answers next to the photos they couldn’t identify. I even have a graph that tracks a user’s scores over time, so one could see if there’s been any decline in memory based on those scores.

After seeing all of the amazing apps others were able to make, I almost felt like I hadn’t done enough. One person made an app listing all of the fossil discoveries around the world, another made a weather heat map of San Francisco. All in all, some very impressive apps and definitely inspiring for future app ideas.

Graduation, dinner, party, after-party, home. The weekend calls for some serious studying in preparation for Phase 3, so I’ll probably focus on repeating Hartl’s Rails Tutorial. I’m hoping to have some time to decompress a bit, but we’ll see.

Until Monday, I’m Edwin Unger and I’m a web developer in training.