Teach a man to fish

Mobile Makers Day 11 — NSDictionary, NSURLConnection and API

Today was a strange day after coming back form a long weekend. Strange meaning, I felt very worn out and tired. I think I got most of the concepts and I feel like I can somewhat explain it, but still feeling not as solid as I would like on these new concepts.

Luckily, and unluckily I paired up with someone who new a lot about JSON code. The good news was were we able to fly through the MVP challenge. Bad news was, I didn’t feel like I learned as much since I didn’t get to learn it myself. I didn’t mind not knowing everything, but I suppose he didn’t really explain as he was doing some stuff. I think it was because he was assuming that I knew a lot and it wasn’t a good mix, in my opinion.

We didn’t really do the pair programming thing since we didn’t switch off the driving. For me it was again, way too fast with without really talking out the architecture or what was going on with the design. Strangely enough, I was able to convey it to others and folks would come to me to ask how we did it, but I didn’t really do it or learn it on my own.

He definitely gave me a fish; I didn’t learn how to fish.

I really hope that is not the way I come off. I don’t want to just spew out answers. I want folks to come to me because they feel like they can learn just a little bit from me and that I can communicate well enough to explain things.

I think I’ll try to do some other practice of getting JSON data with NSURLConnections and APIs. I have done it in the past so I guess I’m sure I can do it. I don’t know. Maybe I’m just tired. Maybe I do understand it. It’s definitely not something I feel comfortable in by wheelhouse just yet though. Better practice some more and stop pretending to be a writer. ☺

Before I stop though, I want to at least record a couple cool things I actually did learn today:

Never call viewDidLoad directly.

Code for today and do not try to future proof everything.

JSON is used for mobile versus XML because it is light and a fraction of the size of XML.

AVAudioPlayer only seems to work when it is defined as a property versus and instance variable.