Summing up at the end of Assignment 2

Quite some time since I posted on my blog(The case study and FB seminar do not count). First things first. This new dynamic theme by blogger is just awesome. It lets users customize their own layouts for reading on different devices and works like a charm. As you must have noticed, I just applied such a theme to my blog and its really neat. I guess all this must be due to blogger's realization that most blogs are read using rss feed readers and aggregators like google reader, Flipboard etc.

Peer Review

What I got was mostly the usual limitations which I am trying to get rid of. "Be more confident", "Don't be afraid that people won't pay attention to you. They will only if you are sure of yourself." Well I really thank my friends for such feedback and I promise I will keep working on this. One technical feedback I got was to improve my programming style with respect to web programming, minute things like where to declare which variables etc. Well, I sure have come a long way in that department and this is surely much easier than the other area to be improved on :P.

UOMe - Technical Points

The past few weeks have been quite hectic. For my second assignment I worked on the front end. One of the major goals was to make the user interface as simple as possible and easy to use on mobile devices. We decided to use JQuery Mobile for our project rather than Sencha as the programming approach was to enhance existing html markup rather than adopt a different coding style as in Sencha. One of the major obstacles I faced was that the framework was still evolving and there were bugs especially in the ajax transitions between pages. The first thing to pick up is not to attach event listeners to $(document).ready() and to the pageinit event instead as the DOM is loaded only once and ajax is used to fetch the rest of the pages and insert them into the DOM. Another related issue was to have unique ids for elements for each page so that events on them would trigger correctly. The most time consuming was to identify if a bug in the ui was caused due to the framework or my coding style was wrong. It really takes some time to get used to this ajax way of loading pages, considering I don't have that much experience in web programming.

UOMe - Key Takebacks

Other than the tachnical points I learnt, the most important takeback for me is that I feel much more confident in developing web applications. Together with both the Assignments I got to work on both the front and the back end so I kindof have an end-end experience now in web development. I am not sure if I am actually technically better or it just seems so but I am surely much more confident in web programming than before and am happy to have had a varied experience with PhP and JQuery frameworks. One of my initial goals was to get better at web programming and learn the 'tricks' so to speak. Well, I sure feel am on the right track.

The Schedule

Assignment 2 was really hectic as I said before. In the last few days before the submission, I literally camped in my friend's room coding away and squashing bugs. Not to mention the ATAP internship interviews which came in the middle. Interestingly, all the long hours of coding and the pain our team shared somehow gave me supreme confidence at the interviews. I think experience really gives us confidence. At the end of the week I also had my extension submission for CP3108B Mozilla@NUS and two other midterms and well, here I am having tackled all of them, having gone through all the pain and suffering and blogging away.

To be frank, I had no idea how I would make it through the week with my assignment 2 submission, my CP3108B mid-term presentaation and my two mid-terms. But, now that I am here I would say, "What doesn't kill you makes you Stronger."
Looking forward to pushing the boundaries again... :)