Day 23: front-end testing

>>> Brief overview

Coding was short and sweet today, because we spent the morning touring the new Bloomberg offices and talking with a few of their engineers there (and there really are only a few there, 15 in total right now). We Hackbrights nearly doubled the population of people in that building. There was a nice discussion of company culture and a brief demo of the cool things you can learn from a Bloomberg terminal. We saw how Bloomberg uses maps to display real-time data about ships in the San Francisco harbor. I nearly shrieked “I could make that!” when we saw the hallmarks of the Google maps API on the screen. But I contained myself. Just barely.

I continued working on Athena’s geo question in the countries quiz, which can now successfully tell which polygon you’ve clicked on, change it’s fill opacity accordingly, and incorporate that into your total score. The other cool thing I set up today was a zoom/lat/long based on the continent your country is in, so the map dynamically updates and helps get oriented. Woot!

>>> Where I struggled

Debugging in the console is a whole different can of worms from debugging in the terminal — and I kept trying to do things in the terminal, because I’m more comfortable there. #Movetowardsthefear.

I spent a long time trying to check whether or not the value of a div was getting updated by writing a nice var check = (“#div-id”).val(); and then console.log(check); ‘ing that check, before realizing that I could just look at the div using developer tools and watch the value attribute update dynamically. Eek! Thanks JavaScript.

>>> Thoughtful takeaway

Maps are powerful. Everyone should make one. Also, some days it’s okay not to work an insane amount of hours to be productive. So right now, I’m going to git push and head to the movies.