2/04/2019

It appears that our classes, for the most part, our classes have turned into project work sessions whilst Todd explains what is required as needed for students. Since my last blog, I have chipped away at milestone two a bit more with the intention of committing some more time to it during this lesson and in the coming days before leaving for China.

What Todd has gone over in class today pertaining to the content of milestone one and two I am for the most part already familiar with, this must mean that I have done an appropriate amount of research into the course materials beforehand.

Throughout the rest of the class, I worked on Milestone One until we had to leave.

1/04/2019

Since the last blog post, I have made headway into milestone 1, my goal is to finish milestone 1 and possibly 2 before I head off to China at the end of the week.

For those that are interested in using WordPress, Todd did an in-class demo of installing WordPress on your PC.

For the rest of the class I spent my time installing gingonic, a web development framework built using Go. The class was rather short and basic in terms of content.

26/03/2019

Update

Since the last class, we have handed in the practice project which we completed smoothly. I got a login system deployed on my website which proved to be just as easy as I thought it would be due how laravel makes the process of building prototypes rather efficient. Our IA report was not perfect due to the limited amount of time we put into it but it served as a suitable warmup for the coming assessment by reminding us of the components required for constructing a well flowing & coherent IA document.

Since handing the practice project in I have not looked at anything WEB7 related due to the current urgency put forward by other subjects at the moment.

Going forward

Before leaving for China I would like to get a good portion of Assessment 2 done to reduce the workload we have while in China. Todd has advised that it would be a good idea for us to begin thinking about Assessment 3, beginning with sending him an email by the end of the week which details the technology we want to use for this assessment.

I currently intend to find a technology that will be related to my project in some form if possible, this will, in turn, aid me in my project next semester.

I am looking forward to the development process of Assessment 2 as well as the new territory I will cover in Assessment 3 by looking at new, unfamiliar technology. At this stage, I am keen on looking at a mobile development framework which may prove helpful to me in the future.

19/03/2019

Today we are being run through the project specs & the course outline to ensure that as a class we are on track yipee, following this week we will be getting stuck into our actual assessment work which will be a welcome change to the current practice work we are doing. I am looking forward to getting stuck into using a framework to build a site.

The brief revolved around a berry growing company in which we have a list of requirement, the tricky one appears to be the berry quality price calculator, which is to price berries on certain metrics. I am currently unsure of how to approach this without using machine learning which would make it too big of a job. I will have to come up with something more simple to fulfil this requirement.

It will be good to get our heads around what's required asap.

After class, the majority of our group headed over to the library to continue our work on the project, after waiting a while for our files to transfer to the server we continued on with alternative work & decided to meet up at Racheals the following night.

18/03/2018

Before class today our group met up in the library to continue progress on our practice project, this mainly pertaining to further getting our heads around meteor & laravel. I was pursuing the implementation of a login system in meteor & the other members were pursuing knowledge in laraval.

Today's focus is around techniques for deploying from local machine to server. We will be using WinSCP to upload our site's code to the server's file structure.

Something to keep in mind in this transition is that we will have to potentially point at a different database dependant on how the migration process turns out pertaining to our database. It is also noted to make sure our scrips are updated to correctly access the data in the new database location.

We spent some time practising the process of uploading websites to our host, this process contained a bit of finesse but there is plenty of online content to aid in this.

Some directory references generally have to be changed in this process, easily done with research pertaining to the platform you are uploading to.

12/03/2019

The importance of command interfaces has been emphasized to us for the modern day professional web developer.

Accessibility in web design refers to the concept of people of different circumstances being able to access & understand a webpage. This can be due to lack of a sense(e.g. sight, hearing) or some form of other outside circumstance.

The marking schedule was gone over this week, it was shown to be rather similar to the web6 marking schedule when it comes to the IA part, important factors being what conclusions did you draw from each step. Explanations of your content are also crucial to being recognized for full marks.

Other key inclusions:

• references
• citations
• conclusion
• intro
• etc

We were introduced to a tool to help the teamwork aspect of our project, this being an intro to Scrum, which was shown to be an efficient way of keeping a project on track in large part due to the burndown chart, which helps visualize the average amount of productivity per day which is measured against the amount of time the project is expected to take. 

This form of agile methodology system appears highly productive at a glance and would be enjoyable to experiment with.

Following the class my group studied in the library within the different work we had been assigned for our team project, I took it upon myself to see if I can throw a page up with meteor, ideally with some form of plugin that we may require. Jake & Racheal were helping each other progress with laravel and finally, Patrick was finishing off our wireframing for the website concept.

Once I get something thrown up in meteor I will review our progress to date to assess if we need to implement anything else to our practice project work.

11/03/2019

Todd began this week by saying we are being given time to catch up on what we should currently be doing; milestone two. Our group has begun this section of the practice project but has not progressed very far into it. It seems a little complicated, we will see how we get along.

We will likely meet tomorrow morning to continue on our out of class work.

Todd is helping us become more familiar with our website hosting platform, this included logging in and editing files via git command line tools & via WinSCP. I think I would prefer using WinSCP as I have grown up using GUI interfaces as opposed to direct cmd commands.

We also got run through how to connect to our MySQL database via the same command line method, also we were shown how to run SQL files from the command line as well. All of these command line methods allow for what is in some cases a more efficient way of editing our website environment.

mor or cat show the contents of a file in the command line, this can be potentially useful.

The next day before the following class we met up in the library to tick along with some more IA documentation. We progressed nicely, getting stuck into the milestone two phase of the practice project, comparing laravel and meteor has revealed that they are somewhat similar with laravel seemingly taking the edge for us.