I fell down an Ionic rabbit hole!

For my final DevMountain project I want to use Ionic. I started on the getting-started page - which seemed like the really super-duper obvious place to start. When I got to step 3, specifically ionic platform add, ionic build, & ionic emulate[1] I started chasing not just a white rabbit, but a whole warren of white rabbits! First android AVDs, then JVMs, then Android Studio, then gradle, then AVDs again, then Genymotion. If I didn’t already have short hair, I would have by this point. Finally, one of the other students mentioned that Amy-Kate had some Ionic experience. I let her know I was pretty sure I was down the rabbit hole and really needed a guide to help me return to reality. A few moments later, she introduced me to ionic serve and pointed me to the Ionic Guide.

If you’re just starting out with Ionic, save yourself the rabbit hunt - start with the Ionic Guide!!!

This is for all my DevMountain cohort members - compare your GitHub Contributions graphic (i.e. github.com/your_username) to mine - https://github.com/metasean . See all those greenish blocks on the right-hand side of my contributions graphic? If you don’t have a lot of those green blocks, then this post is for you!

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In our last week of classes we covered Test Driven Development (TDD) with Jake Trent and Firebase with Chris Esplin.

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Last week our focus was on databases.

Databases hold a special place in my heart. When I was on active duty, one of my jobs was to create a Lotus Approach database to replace a mainframe database. Long story short, I ended up entering my current profession primarily because of the power I saw in databases (at least, that’s how I would have described it at the time, now I’d describe it more as ‘the power of big data’).

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Holy smokes, Bat-viewers! Today’s adventure took me down a rabbit-hole and then up out of an ant-hole.

So our focus this week has been on databases. Coolness - the stacks are really starting to feel complete. Today was our second (and final) day with Mongo. Our task for the day was to complete a functional backend and then modularize it. I struggled with some of the syntax to get the backend up and running, but lunch and asking the right people the right questions helped and I was finally up and running. Then I started to modularize my code. I kept getting informative error after informative error. I went through about a dozen silly little things in about five minutes. And then — brick wall! After staring helplessly at the error, not really understanding how I could get such an error, I sought our instructor’s assistance. Unfortunately, it was right at the end of class and he had to leave. So I was stuck with it.

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