Thanksgiving week has arrived and I am excited for some turkey and a mental break! We started the week with our usual stand up meeting and then moved right into brainstorming ideas for our capstone projects. Everyone had great ideas for applications and I was struggling deciding on which of my ideas I should tackle. Cameron helped me decide on “Quack”. It will be a google chrome extension that students and teachers of Origin Code Academy can use. Students and teachers will be able to sign into the application with their google account. They can then select which cohort at origin they are in. Students now will be able to “quack” videos, blog posts, images, tools, or whatever they find on the internet to the cohort they are enrolled in. This will allow the students to learn through each other.
I liked this idea a lot over my other ones because this will actually have users and I would have loved to have had this application for our Origin cohort! I would often come across a great guide or video on how to do a particular thing we learned in class. I would then usually tell everyone about the video in our morning stand up meetings and if a fellow classmate was interested in it I would slack them the link. This was great but just had a lot of steps and there was no central place to see all the great information that we aggregated throughout the cohort. I am excited to get this
built and running. Having users will be a great experience for me. I will be able to receive feedback and fix the application based on the feedback much like the real world.
After deciding what I was going to build, I was ready to dive in and get started. I spent mostly all day Monday learning about chrome extensions. Then on Tuesday I used a great tool called draw.io to help layout my data structure. Once I did that I started setting up the project in visual studio.
Wednesday was a travel day for me. I flew back to St.Louis and then drove 2 hours from there back to Effingham Illinois. Seeing all my family and friends was a whole lot of fun! I stopped at my uncles house Thanksgiving afternoon and had some of the most amazing ham I have ever had! It was incredible. After stuffing my face there and playing ninja turtles with my cousins we headed over to my Grandpas house! Let me tell you one thing… HE CAN COOK! He had a spread suitable for a king. We had some amazing Turkey, ham, sweet potatoes, corn, mashed potatoes, gravy, and the BEST dressing on the planet Earth. After the amazing meal the turkey coma set in.
The rest of my week was spent catching up with family and friends. I feel bad because I took some time off from coding but I am excited as ever to get back at it. The next couple of weeks I’ll walk you through my build process of Quack. I hope everyone had as good of a holiday as I. Check back for the next blog post!