The week started out on Sunday when I took a look at some code that Jim had introduced to us about a month ago. At the time, I had only a vague idea of what the code was for and how it worked. Now I realized that I understood it fairly thoroughly. (Progress!)

Early this week, we all worked on getting our chat functions working with Horizon, placing data on a web page for retrieval. Wednesday we had a lecture on Java (even though our course is front end web development) so that we would have an idea of what it was about and what it did. Thursday, our class voted to have Jim go over APIs and jQuery (he included Bootstrap as a bonus), all of which was very useful. For the afternoon lab session, we were asked to develop code to get data from an API with  jQuery, and at the end of class I was feeling discouraged because I had been unable to make a successful connection to the server. After a brief discussion on Slack in the evening, I was back on track on Friday and made a successful API retrieval using jQuery. Not only that, but I felt I understood the jQuery code clearly.

I have been going over previous assignments and improving the code and functionality in preparation for building an online “portfolio” of my work. I am very pleased with myself for taking code that I wrote only 2 weeks ago and making significant improvements to the style, functionality, and sophistication. Friday afternoon, Jim went over with me how to place that code on one of my web pages to start the online portfolio.

Friday morning we also went over my project for the upcoming “Demo Day” in detail, mostly diagramming it on the board.  Working on this will, I expect, take up a significant part of the next 3 weeks. I feel excited about getting started with it.