In my previous post, I've mentioned, I joined the Ravensbourne Intro to app making course which is run by 2 very friendly and nice instructor Matteo and Aimee. Its a 6 week (every Saturday for 4 hours) course where I was able to sharpen my HTML and CSS skills and was introduced to Programming in jQurey and cloud based backend database like Firebase!
I took the advantage of using the macbook provided during the course everyday. We used mozilla thimble IDE to type and paste our codes and view the results instantly on the web. The instructors tried to engage us with the lectures as much as possible with quizes and role-plays. Matteo was a code veteran and prime tutor; Aimee helped as the jargon buster which proved to be a nice combination of teaching.
By the end of 4th week, our front end was ready and we were introduced to Firebase as the backend to pull our data from. It has been an awesome experience to explore the power of jQuery, javascript and Firebase when combined.
On 5th week, we started working on our own Project. I tweaked my app to show a list of Countries ranked based on 5 criteria. The user can Also list their country and score it. Based on the high scores, it will show up on the list which is best for i.e. education or stability.
When we hit the 6th week, our apps were fully working we came out of the thimble shell and moved onto github as the hosting platform. the instructors shared a lot of resources, inspirations and tips for us to move on. I've decided move forward to explore more about Javascript, Github, Firebase and command-line.
I'd say, the course was an eye opener for me as a new-bee in the web development arena, where I actually got to build something dynamic and get a confidence boost on my self-taught journey of coding. Webapps are more clear to me, and I know the basic pipeline for deploying a data-push-pull based webapps now. The course was priced at 94£ which is even lower for Greenwich residents.
Here's the app I built: http://goo.gl/HWHmW9
