It’s been too long since I posted, and already left some stuff out of my last post. We have been neck deep in Backbone (see what I did there?) with projects that have taken more and more time each day to complete. That means less time for this blog, side projects or learning other things on the side. All of that is okay though, because Backbone has been awesome.

Models and collections were very intuitive for me and seemed to address any inheritance issues that I had been having. AJAX calls are a breeze. The worst part of Backbone was definitely the views. I found them very powerful, yet ornery. Luckily, we have since incorporated React, and the experience is like night and day. I feel like I have the ability to crank out an awesome, highly-functional sites relatively quickly with this set up.

We are pretty much done when it comes to adding big pieces to our puzzle, from here on it is delving deeper into React, Backbone, and ancillary knowledge like cookies, databases, and CMS’s. I’m just gonna share all the projects I’ve done since last post with a brief description.

5 3 turn game
_Edit description_graysonhicks.github.io

This is a great turn-based game I built for my little boys. This was actually our last project before Backbone, so spaghetti code and bloat was an issue, but overall I really enjoyed it, and if anything it showed the value of an MVC.

6 2 loading button
_Edit description_graysonhicks.github.io

This was my first Backbone app, it taps into two APIs, one to get a latitude and longitude based on a zip code. This feeds into a Brewery API to find breweries near you. I also built a little node.js server with Express to handle the API call to the Brewery API since it had a cross origin restriction.

tiy 6 3 contact form
_Edit description_graysonhicks.github.io

This was our first project working with someone else. Seems easy, turns out it opens up a whole new world of issues. Overall, though, turned out great. It’s just a little contact book app, basic CRUD stuff.

7 2 react chat
_Edit description_graysonhicks.github.io

This is a really cool chat room app that each student built. All access the same heroku server so we could chat with each other. Lots of fun, loved implementing React for the views on this.

That’s all for now, but lots of cool apps this week that I’ll be able to post next time.