This morning’s lecture was on JavaScript templating. There’s plenty to talk about in this realm, and next week we’ll actually be diving into some advanced JS challenges. This was just a high level overview of the available frameworks. We’ve already discussed Handlebars, which is definitely on the low-powered side, but there’s also Angular, Backbone, Express, etc. The list goes on, and if you wait six months, there will be a whole new list.

We didn’t discuss Node.js because we were only talking about front-end frameworks, and they’re really trying to focus us on Rails for back-end. A lot of folks are interested in Node, but most everyone wants to check out Angular and keep Rails strictly in the back-end.

We got back to work on our Stack Overflow challenge, today implementing a markdown widget. First, we had to figure out how to display our text inside a box in real time as we typed inside another box. Then, we had to create a switch statement that looked for different markdown punctuation and applied the appropriate effect. If it saw a *, it looked for the second * and then italicize everything between them. It would also look for # at the beginning of sentences, count the amount, and change the heading size appropriately. It also had to slice off the hashes after it changed the heading size so you wouldn’t see several # in front of your typed sentence.

Our afternoon lecture was on advanced CSS. We discussed SASS, which is a CSS grid framework. I’m already using it on my website, so it was nice to see something I’m familiar with. We also chatted about some others, including Tiny Grid, which was created by one of our DBC teachers. We played around with it a little in our afternoon work, but mainly stuck to regular CSS.

Tonight I focused on a bit of CSS, but mostly looked at Firebase, as part of the lecture I have to give next week. Here’s hoping I can figure out enough to appear intelligent on the subject.

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