Week 8 is underway

It's week 8 at Coder Camps which means I'm in the middle of our group project. We're working on getting a beta version of the app ready this week, and possibly as soon as tomorrow. Saturday I participated in a Hack-a-thon at Coder Camps, where I built out the backend of an online feedback app. I also wrote a short guide on setting up GitHub Pages this weekend.

The group project is going well. In the last 8 days we've studied the code, the business requirements, and the wireframes. We've been introduced to Team Foundation Server for version control and project management. We identified a list of bugs in the code passed to us, and resolved half of them. We've also made significant progress on adding more details needed for the beta goals to be considered met. Today I worked on making sure all forms on the page implemented solid client-side validation. I also re-wrote some code so that users will now be prevented from sending duplicate AJAX calls to the API when submit buttons are clicked multiple times. Good day :)

The Hack-a-thon was a lot of fun. I worked on a five person team to create an app that would allow multiple users to log in at once, create feedback suggestions and comments, with voting, and some administrative functions. We used jQuery, KnockoutJS, C# MVC, and SQL. I got to write the backend Web API, repositories, a database seeder, and several of the POCO classes. This was the first time I'd had the chance to write a Web API top to bottom. We ran into some issues trying to get full CRUD operations going with the client side but resolved them and learned some new things about authentication along the way. All the functionality is not there yet, but we are close. A roommate of mine at the Hack Shack and I are planning to spend some time finishing it this week.

And then last night I put together a little one page guide on hosting content on GitHub using GitHub Pages. I realized today I should add another small section dealing with issues that come up when trying to host a project started as a solution in Visual Studios, so I'll be probably work on updating that later tonight.

That's pretty much everything that's going on right now. Oh, I did see Godzilla yesterday. But other than that, its all eat, sleep, code.