Day 1 - 30 Day Challenge

Day 1: Learning AngularJS (vs Etoys)

So I have decided as I learn AngularJS to compare it to Etoys.  Admittedly not a fair comparison as both server different purposes, but hey its my learning journey and I will go where my strange mind and interests take me (I have found this path mostly useful and a lot of fun).

I am Shaping up with Angular.js from Code School.  I completed the first two levels.

So today I learned about:

• Modules
• Controllers
• some directives
• ng-repeat
• ng-show
• ng-hide
• ng-src
• Filters (uppercase, lowercase, currency, date, etc)
• and some things about Bootstrap

The examples used in the course center around displaying a set of product data on the web.

I found myself thinking about how you do things in AngularJS vs how I would do it in Etoys.  Why you may ask would I want to compare two very different things?  Well while they are different at a very high level they are both tools for expressing ideas and both use MVC (Model View Controller).  Now when I say MVC I am not talking about the "modern" definition and use as found in various web frameworks such as AngularJS etc, but in the original definition from Trygve Reenskaug:

"The essential purpose of MVC is to bridge the gap between the human user's mental model and the digital model that exists in the computer." (see here)

Also I feel by trying to compare two very different approaches and trying to get to the "essense" of what they do and how they go about it I may actually gain some slightly deeper understanding.

I actually spent some time trying to build "directives" in Etoys and and while I created a "toUpperCase directive" and mapped a set of data (in a Holder) to a "Form",  it didn't feel right.  

I then recalled Dan Ingalls. The Live Web - Drag 'n Drop in the Cloud (video, JS CONF USA 2012) talk and thought that using connectors and converts would be a better approach. Basically I really like the idea of "connecting to a data source" then writing a converter to massage the data into a format that can be received by a visualization tool (table, list, graph, etc).

Cheers,
Stephen

The 30 Day Learning Challenge

“I believe that we learn by practice. Whether it means to learn to dance by practicing dancing or to learn to live by practicing living, the principles are the same. In each, it is the performance of a dedicated precise set of acts, physical or intellectual, from which comes shape of achievement, a sense of one's being, a satisfaction of spirit. One becomes, in some area, an athlete of God. Practice means to perform, over and over again in the face of all obstacles, some act of vision, of faith, of desire. Practice is a means of inviting the perfection desired.”
― Martha Graham

Sadly I have not been able to spend much time writing code, which I really enjoy.  I am working with people who code, reading their code, specifying requirements and on rare occasions doing code walk throughs.  

So I have decided to take it upon myself to "practice" coding everyday for the next 30 days.  My initial thoughts were to practice coding in EtoysJS or  lively-web and perhaps I will get there at some point.  But the pressures of work push me towards AngularJS at the moment so I will start there. That said I also intend to use this not just to practice programming but to explore other topics of interest such as how to teach programming.

“What I have achieved by industry and practice, anyone else with tolerable natural gift and ability can also achieve.”
― Johann Sebastian Bach

“For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them.”
― Aristotle, The Nicomachean Ethics