We presented our Thunder Talk on Server Initiated Communication first thing this morning. I feel like it went really well, and I’m looking forward to using FireBase on my final project, or on another app in the near future.

We talked about how regular server/client communication works, how SIC has improved that, and some of the technologies that utilize it. FireBase is the best known one, and it’s especially useful to us at DBC because it’s fully supported by several different languages and frameworks, including Rails.

The challenge of the day was to create Twitter completely asynchronously in Rails using AJAX to make a one page app. My pair and I stumbled through it for quite a bit and only managed to get a few of the features working, namely the top trends and top tweets to post as they were created. There was a lot of JavaScript involved, and some of it was just beyond our understanding at the moment.

Afternoon brought a brief chat with the DBC Careers team, but it still felt like most of the information was being kept from us. Most of the questions we asked were side-stepped and we were told not to worry about it until after we graduated. It made me think that any communication with careers should just wait until they’re ready to actually share information. Ah well.

The afternoon lecture was by a guest who’s currently being interviewed to become a DBC teacher. She was very nice, but wasn’t fully prepared with the appropriate materials, so I felt like our time could have been better spent working on the Twitter challenge.

This evening, several of us got together to prepare for tomorrow’s Assessment. We knew that we would be expected to build a CRUD app and create AJAX requests in Rails, so we set about doing just that. It took us a little while to create all of the controllers, models, and migration files, but once we had the first couple pages created, we decided to focus on the AJAX calls, since that would be the more difficult part. We managed to make everything work, and I’m feeling pretty confident for tomorrow. It was especially helpful to be the one writing the code and creating the app, because I always learn better by doing than by watching.

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