Week Six ➙ Iron Yard Reflective Journal

403 Forbidden Planet (of the APIs)

Working with APIs (application programming interfaces) throughout week six at the Iron Yard has been daunting — and comprehending the multifarious nuances, quirks, and idiosyncrasies of various promises and Authorizations (and the asynchronous programming concepts involved) can be maddeningly complex. Taking the leap from mere web_sites_ to building even relatively simple web-_applications_ with restful APIs is a major challenge on the road to becoming a capable front-end developer. Server-side technology is not something I had studied on my own prior to my time at the Iron Yard, and even a capable reader like me with sound comprehension-skills has struggled to filter and extract essential information from API documentation in many cases. Moreover, trying to combine functionality (or even just discover endpoint information) from APIs has proved very difficult for me to grasp this week, let alone effectively implement.

On the plus side, SASS (Syntactically Awesome StyleSheets) really is awesome, by which I mean that it’s much more powerful and robust than CSS since it’s more of a true programming language… More importantly, SASS is much more semantic and intuitive than CSS — and, while I’m still far from mastering even the basics of it, I can at least at this point visualize and understand what it will be like to match styles to detailed designs or reference-implementation and to create those sorts of plans in the first place. In my time at the Iron Yard so far, it’s perhaps this sort of styling and design oriented work that I genuinely like best and most enjoy doing. There’re many other interesting aspects to development and I enjoy it all for the most part of course (or else I wouldn’t be pursuing this sort of career), but everyone has their favorites I guess — and so far SASS is mine. I just makes more sense and is less disjointed compared to vanilla CSS.

On June 8, I carved out some time from the overwhelming schedule of the Iron Yard’s accelerated boot-camp to attend an evening iOS crash-course with Ben Gohlke, the mobile instructor at the Iron Yard. It was interesting to learn some Objective-C and some of the basics of the X-Code interface. Then, on June 12, we had a guest lecture from Brian Gates, the Ruby-on-Rails instructor at the Iron Yard — during which we recreated one of the first CLI programs we created using Ruby instead of JavaScript. In general, I found it conceptually helpful to get some basic preliminary exposure this week to a few other programming languages and to observe some of the similarities and differences in syntax and methods compared to the primary front-end languages we’ve been focusing on.