Week 0.5 & 1 Jan 25: Principles and Practices, Project Management

Coding and final project concepts.

I never coded in my life. The closest I ever got to it was making tables on Fortran 86. Why? I honestly don't know. Anyways, I started to feel very anxious about making websites.

Since I had no idea I asked my friend and collegue and fellow Fab Academy student Rodrigo Diaz and he introduced me to an amazing Coursera course by the University of Michigan's Professor Colleen van Lent, Ph.D. = ""Introduction to HTML5"", which taught me how to do nifty things like hyperlinks as you can see.

However I quickly learned knowing something and applying it or utilizing it is a different matter. There were... Problems. And the F5 button became my best friend and enemy.

After a lot of McDonalds delivery(yes, they deliver here its amazing) and procrastinating "breaks" on Overwatch, and finding out small mistakes like not unifying all pictures to .jpg, not including the link references to go back or to other sites, realizing capitalization matters quite immensely, I got the website to work. I used a .css file format from Bootstrap, using a theme called full width pics for the top menu bar and then customizing a simplier text and picture format for the rest of the site. I also relied heavily on W3Schools for testing codes and learning specific commands to show images or make buttons on the site.

We've also learned an amazingly useful software called GIT which we will be utilizing to upload our files to the servers and also as revision control software. What I learned is that this allows us to locally create or edit files which can be pushed online, but be able to organize different version or branches of templates that can also be saved, edited, or recalled. Basically it makes us look like hackers. By creating an unique SSH key for our computers we can access the server and put cat pictures on the internet for the world to see.

After installing the programs and connecting the folder location to the online git, I can now access and update my website: By first accessing the folder where my webpage content is located using "cd (folder name from C drive)" and using "git pull" to pull the latest information from the website, from other updates by my colleagues. At anytime you can also use the command "git status" to see what changes you have made and if there are any differences in the files you have. After pulling, you can upload new content by first using "git add ." and then "git commit -m '(naming the update version as this)', and then using "git push" to push the information into the servers. After that you can check online to see that you can't spell things correctly and come back and fix your website over and over.

As for deliberations my final project? I was thinking of doing an Burning Man effigy that is sensory capable(ex. giving high fives based on human interaction/responses), kinetically active and solar powered, able to be installed and dismantled for logistics, and self combustible(long range detonation via wifi) but that probably costs a lot of money and I have no confidence in finishing it since I will be abroad for a month during June. So I decided on something that is really shiny and cool and has lights and is pragmatic as well as able to be used often. I want to build a programmed light system that is wired internally inside a bike handlebar/stem, allowing head/rear lights, turning signals, tracking rides and/or even guidance, as well as an anti theft by adding an accelerometer which measures sudden movement of the bike after it is locked and maybe a rear camera to act as a blackbox. I want to make the whole system integrated and also connected wirelessly.