HDWEBTECH

Semester 2

2012-09-16T23:53:00.001+01:00

The last few weeks of semester 1 went by in a blur of project deadlines & exam revision. My lecture notes are a bit cryptic even to me at this stage so there's not much point in trying to write updates for each week. The projects & exams went well, so looking forward now to the challenge of semester 2. Week 1 has already come & gone, so a quick update. The modules this time

Still here

2012-08-28T23:47:00.000+01:00

Exams are over! They weren't too bad I think. Results due out next month some time. Couple of weeks still until we're back to lectures, and in the meantime I really want to get this blog up to date with what we did on the course during the last few weeks of Semester 1. I haven't taken a complete break from the studying - mostly looking at stuff I came across during the summer but didn't have

Week 9

2012-07-24T23:02:00.001+01:00

Ok, so belatedly continuing with the summaries of the weeks thus far. You (hopefully) will already have seen evidence of my amazing Javascript skills if you're reading this post. I was going to throw some jQuery in here too, but don't want to blow anyone's mind completely yet. We started working with Javascript in week 9, using it initially to prompt the page user for some basic information,

Productivity

2012-07-24T22:10:00.000+01:00

I set up an account with RescueTime a good few weeks ago, but have been too busy/productive until now to look at their analysis. This is my productivity overview for the month of July to date. if (typeof rtapi == 'undefined') var rtapi = {}; rtapi.kxYj = {}; rtapi.kxYj.title = 'Overview July 1st to 24th'; rtapi.kxYj.kind = 'default'; rtapi.kxYj.styling = { width:

Project Central

2012-07-18T01:07:00.001+01:00

Ok, the submission date for this blog project has passed, but I figured I might as well keep it going while I'm still doing the course - at least for the rest of semester 1 anyway. I'll get back to the updates on the weeks of the course next time but right now we're a little snowed under with project work. The server-side is due this coming Friday, client-side was last week, while the blog for

Reading Week

2012-07-13T04:54:00.001+01:00

After the MySql exam on the previous Friday (followed by labs on the Saturday), week 8 was a reading week. Time to catch up you would hope. Unfortunately, I came out of the labs with a two-page "to-do" list that threatened to absorb all my spare time of the week. Things got off to bad start when I had to reinstall Rails on my home computer. A lot of "cussin" ensued,

SQL test

2012-07-05T00:00:00.000+01:00

I forgot to mention in my week 7 update that our first continuous assessment exam took place at the end of that week. I think it merits a post of its own though. We were being tested in the Introduction to Computing & Web Technologies module on our understanding of MySql queries. The test format was "open book", meaning we were free to consult our lecture notes, or research online

Week 7

2012-07-03T21:04:00.000+01:00

Week 7 & I was still plugging away at the exercises from the Learn Ruby the Hard Way tutorial. Exercise 26 provided a piece of code that contained a number of mistakes & required working through it to find the errors and fix them. The idea was to replicate real world scenarios where a programmer is not necessarily writing new code of their own, but instead is faced with code written by

Getting git

2012-06-29T22:50:00.000+01:00

Seems I'm only as far as week 6 in terms of running through what we've been doing on the course. That was the week I started this blog, and I had thought at this stage I'd be updating on each week 'as it happened' so to speak. Anyway, week 6 was mostly taken up for me with trying to get a better understanding of git & github. One website in particular proved very helpful in

Learning Resources

2012-06-24T11:14:00.000+01:00

One thing I've come to appreciate while doing this course is the sheer volume of learning resources that are available in the Web 2.0 world. Books with actual pages & lectures with real people still form the foundations when it comes to learning about a new subject, but there are now many more complementary options. One resource I've come across lately is the iTunes university.&

Firebottles & beerbugs

2012-06-22T01:07:00.002+01:00

What happened in week 5? I can't really remember, cos my notes are pretty sparse. I know I spent an evening trying to use Ruby to run through the "99 bottles of beer on the wall" song, but got as far as 98 & figured that was far enough. Client side introduced us to Firebug, which is a nifty tool for looking at how a website is laid out using HTML, CSS, Javascript, etc.

Whoop!

2012-06-15T00:44:00.002+01:00

Week 4 was also when I finally got round to looking at the following video from David Heinemeier Hansson in which he demonstrates using rails to create a blog engine in less than 15 mins. About 2 hours is the quickest I've done it so far. And I'm generally not using the word "whoop" when things go wrong.

MySql installation on Mac

2012-06-14T18:03:00.000+01:00

In week 4 we started working with MySql in the Intro to Computing & Web Technologies module. As MySql was already installed on the college's PC, we were able to get straight into creating databases, generating tables & inserting data into the tables. At home, on my mac computer, it was a different story. The following is a revision of a post I made on a college forum

Week 3 review

2012-06-09T11:55:00.002+01:00

Continuing on with an overview of the 8 weeks of the course so far. By week 3, on the Client Side module, we were well into HTML & were being introduced to CSS. While I was reasonably familiar with HTML prior to starting the course, CSS was a little more challenging at first. We started with in-line styling, i.e. setting style attributes within the HTML markup, using it to adjust the font

Sound of Ruby on Rails

2012-06-07T23:38:00.003+01:00

This is possibly what Ruby on Rails, the open source, full stack web application framework would sound like if it were a piece of electronica (courtesy of soundcloud). Not bad... ... and some MySql (a bit more downbeat)... ... & to finish out my set this evening, some HTML mixin up Ratatat's Seventeen Years & Jay-Z's 99 Problems. Smokin!

Installations

2012-06-06T23:23:00.000+01:00

The plan at the start of the blog was to do a post for each week that we've covered so far & then once up to date try to update each week with 2/3 posts on what's happening on the course. This will be a quick run through of week 2. This was when we started into programming, specifically Ruby programming. It's apparently one of the easiest programming languages to learn,

Learning new languages

2012-06-04T13:29:00.001+01:00

Ok, we're now into our 8th week on the course. It's a reading week, so time to catch up on everything & try to tick a few things off the to-do list. The weather's been a bit more study-friendly this weekend so that helps. First off, just in case anyone's reading this that isn't on the course (unlikely I know, but hey...), I suppose I'd better give a quick overview of what the

Blog tweaking

2012-06-03T09:30:00.000+01:00

Just a quick update on what I've done with the blog so far (aside from the posts themselves). The design is a work in progress. I'm going to post screenshots as I'm going along to track the changes. Here's the first: The Twitter link was easy enough to set up (see their widget resources here). The YouTube feed settings can be accessed through the blog's Layout page by

Week 1 - Induction & Introductions

2012-06-02T21:22:00.004+01:00

The first week of the course was about getting a sense of what sort of work we'd be doing for the next 12-13 weeks & trying not to panic at the scale of that work. Even the number of pre-installed desktop icons on the college's PCs seemed daunting - I hadn't heard of many of the applications they represented, never mind knowing how to use them. But the introductory talks were

Why am I here?

2012-05-29T20:34:00.001+01:00

So, why am I doing this course? A few reasons, some vague & long-term, others more immediate. I suppose it's been in the back of my mind for a while (i.e. a few years!) to do something to update my skill set, to push that dull business degree that I drudged through a few years ago a bit further down the CV. At work, I had developed a competency in a lot of things (customer

id="first post"

2012-05-27T00:00:00.000+01:00

This blog will be a form of thinking out loud about the course I'm currently doing at the National College of Ireland. Why I'm doing the course, how I'm finding it, what I hope to do with it once it's done. We're already a few weeks into it at this stage, so I'll run through the first month or so initially, and then try to keep it updated as the weeks progress. We'll see how it