Day 12: MVP Complete!
>>> Brief summary
Bammo! The seven components of my minimum viable product are complete as of today. You can log in to Athena, take a few single-question capital quizzes, see your scores per continent, and check out how you compare against the average scores of all other users using a simple graph. Well, not you, but I can. We don’t do deployment until the fourth week, but that’s not the point. It’s small, and yet it’s mighty!
Aside from project time today, we had a great study hall discussion with our fearless leader Joel about network security. We learned about vampire taps (eek!), the real difference between compiled and interpreted languages, and took a closer look at the HTTPS handshake. Here’s what I got from that, boiled down quite a bit:
You can send an encrypted message over HTTP no problem, but someone can easily intercept that message.
HTTPS follows HTTP, just with a security wrapper. It’s a way your browser can say “Hey! I want this IP address. Also, IP address, can you verify your identity with a certificate that I know about?” If not, you might get a nice error like I got when I tried to sign up in the For Developers link at Wolfram Alpha:
Huge bummer. Looks like I won’t be hanging out with that API for my phase 2 development.
Next up: Exploring a Google Chrome plugin, playing with d3 for better data visualization, updating my login form, adding more questions to the quiz, and maybe building a user-interactive map of some sort. In no particular order, plus or minus anything else I explore this week.
>>> Where I struggled
I wrote out a LOT of code and defined a ton of variables in python for the route that calculated a user’s average score on quizzes per continent, before it dawned on me that I should just be putting things in a dictionary. And then I wrote out a ton more variables to grab things out of that dictionary to pass to Jinja before it struck me that I might actually just be able to pass Jinja the whole dictionary. I realized I was completely underestimating Jinja this whole time. And I deleted 100 lines of code immediately.
>>> Thoughtful takeaway
It feels good to set up a task and knock it down, no matter how small. One of my mentors told me at the beginning of this process that the best cure for imposter syndrome is programming. If you write some code and it does something, then bam! It’s there. It’s tangible. It’s real. And no one tell you (or, more importantly, you can’t honestly tell yourself) that you couldn’t do it.
