Tuesday, April 1, 2014

Week 9, Day 2: Language 80-20 is Up and Running

Major Activities of the Day: We started in earnest on Language 80/20 today!  After figuring out how to seed the data last night, it was time to give our application a face.  We built up the views a bit, to show words from each language and paginate, and choose on the front page which language and how many words to view.  Each word now displays its translations as a tooltip.

We had some trouble getting translations to display when we launched to Heroku, and spent quite a while working with Heroku logs trying to show the information we needed, and making tons of commits in order to be able to push up to Heroku and debug.  We finally realized that the translations weren't showing up because we were using the unofficial API-ish Google Translate gem (which is more of a scraper), and Google has presumably learned not to respond to GET requests from herokuapp.com.  So we realized we would have to gather the data on our own, seed the database, and work from there.  That will be a project for the next couple of days.

We had a middle-of-the-day Skype conversation with Tom Dale, one of the creators of EmberJS.  He came down pretty hard on Rails for being slower than JavaScript (in terms of both execution and size of Ajax requests), which I was aware of, but I guess this was a good reminder to me that many employers will want me to program in other languages because of the problems with Ruby and Rails.  As an aside, he happens to be a pretty inspiring example of how quickly someone can become a great programmer.  Six years ago, he was a non-CS college grad working in the Apple store, and got himself hired for a programming job in the company.  Fast forward to today, and he's partnered with Yehuda Katz to create EmberJS, a JavaScript framework that's rapidly growing in popularity.  Pretty cool stuff.

At the end of the day, we made a brief video showcasing what we'd done over the course of the day.  We're supposed to do this every day over the course of the project.

Skills developed: Working with Twitter Bootstrap, debugging with Heroku logs

P.S. Version 0.0 is already up - check out our app at language-80-20.herokuapp.com!

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