Author Archives: Lucy Negash

Winding down + what’s next

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As we approach our final class (I’m really looking forward to having the Washington Post developer speak to us about her work!), it’s been crazy to reflect on how far we have come, as Greg mentioned, and what we are able to understand vs. what we are able to go. Our final project has been an excellent lesson is basically learning how to just Google and navigate our way through a world that is still very unfamiliar to us, in the big scheme of things.

I also can’t stress enough how much of an untapped resource Codecademy is — I so wish I had more time in the future to explore that further and teach myself more languages, even if I never get to use them. I definitely want to keep my account open and active so I can go back to it later.

Because I also did a portfolio site, it was hard for me to gauge exactly what I’d need to include on the page for it to look like a full-fledged portfolio that I would want to direct future employers to. In the future, I’d like to explore explore the portfolio pages of colleagues and other people in my field just online to see what other kind of interesting facets people will include (a slideshow perhaps? Maybe something more interactive with my work?). I’m looking forward to exploring this further, as well as continuing to hone and refresh my skills with CodeAcademy.

Final-ly done!

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Our final projects are completed, and I can definitely say that this was a huge learning process not only for my coding ability but also my general understanding of the Internet (calling back to our first week of class!) and the various terminologies I’m not familiar with. This was a very challenging assignment — and personally, one that I wished we had been working on since the beginning of class — but the time crunch certainly helped me put myself in the shoes of real developers who are likely given incredible deadlines to get so much more than was expected of me done.

One of the toughest parts of this assignment was simply learning how to Google everything, and realizing that there was a lot not covered in class that I was teaching myself just to get things on my site to run smoothly. Not to say that our class wasn’t helpful — and it absolutely was! — but I think relying on Google taught us the real way that developers learn and troubleshoot their own problems. It was a challenge, but at least it was very true to the real world.

As outlined in my final pitch post, I made the following modifications. Overall I’m fairly happy with the outcome of my website, and I hope I’ll be able to come back to it post-class to make other tweaks later on as I continue to progress in my professional career. Looking forward to reading everyone’s feedback!

  • A contact form in the footer of each page that will send an email to me alerting me of the submission.
  • Display an embedded document (my resume) on my website.
  • Add images of me and my previous work.
  • I will add link to my social media accounts as a way for website visitors to find me.
  • Add a Google font to make the text more unique and interesting.
  • Hover over menu options at the top of the screen in a particular color.
  • Add a Google map displaying my international work and travel.
  • Additional theme, color, and design element changes, including modifications to the navigation bar.

URL: lucynegash.com

GitHub: https://github.com/lucynegash/finalproject

Google Everything

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This week I definitely saw a shift in my learning as we continued to work on and finalize our finished websites. I struggled throughout the weekend but working with a study group was definitely helpful, and as I was able to work through the small tasks I had set for myself, I gained confidence in what I was able to not only understand, but also accomplish.

During the rest of this week up until my final project is due, I hope to put the last final touches on my content and then make sure it is displayed and running to the best of my ability. I’m still not totally sure if the number of customizations needed will suffice for the assignment (and is probably my greatest concern before we turn in our GitHub links on Sunday) but I’m sure hoping! I’ve also noticed that using our Google group email has been really great, since its much easier to respond back and read questions and answers in a timely fashion that can sometimes help inform what we’re already working on.

I also totally agree with Molly’s last comment about Codecademy – they were super helpful in learning the languages, but since we learned HTML and CSS (my two most comfortable languages — maybe because they are the simplest for me?) in the first two weeks of class, I could definitely use a refresher on syntax. I may go back and try to relearn at least those two languages post-finals, if possible.

 

 

Slowly but surely

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This week was definitely a reality check as I dove more into working on my final project. I thought I would have a better handle at incorporating elements of HTML, CSS and more into our modifications but I’ve found myself Googling a lot more than I thought.

Meeting with a study group this weekend was definitely helpful, but I’ve ran into a few questions that hopefully can be answered and potentially discussed in class this week:

  1. At what point does coding modifications end and WordPress modifications begin? Is there a general rule of thumb we should be following when making edits (content is made through WordPress, style is through coding, etc.)
  2. How do we modify items in our theme PHP files when they are written in PHP or HTML? I have come across instances where there seems to be PHP (or perhaps HTML we just haven’t learned yet?) that I’d like to change, but I’m not sure how we would in our child theme.
  3. Can caching be explained further as we make our modifications? It has played a large role in my ability to refresh and make edits to various parts of my page, and I hope we’ll be able to talk more about this in class, ways around it, etc.

The readings this week were definitely a nice break from working through Sublime and Google – I especially like the API YouTube video, as Savannah mentioned. It nicely (and concisely) talked about what our topic for this week, and was a nice primer to what I’m sure will be a great conversation in class.

Final Project + Project Management Thoughts

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This week we discussed agile and waterfall as two different ways of tackling project management when it comes to working on various web design and coding tasks. So much of our class thus far has been centered around actually learning the material, and I had never really stopped to think how what we were learning in the classroom would be applied to real-life situations, in which we would hypothetically “work in teams” to complete a larger project. I had no clue that people took project management within coding so seriously (from our reading of the Agile Manifesto during class this past week), but I can certainly understand its importance and significance when trying to tackle such a difficult beast. I can also definitely see where GitHub would come into play in these cases, but working with/against GitHub has been one of the hardest parts of the class so far for me, but I value its ability to help people work together and even troubleshoot different pieces of code. I’m not totally sure which category I would fall into if I were a developer in the real world – or if I could even apply it to my own work style now as a PR professional – but I’m definitely interested in reading more and discussing the pros and cons that come with each style.

We have been instructed to work on our final projects this week, as we will continue to do for the rest of the semester, and I have found myself worrying about working against the clock. I’ve been so slow in putting different elements together, going into our WordPress content folders to tweak pieces of code, and testing out different stylistic themes/designs, and I worry that there just won’t be enough time at the end of the day to make my website what I truly want it to be. I’m definitely thankful that WordPress has so many built in style and layout pieces, but when I go in to make even tiny tweaks I’m not totally sure if I’m doing enough to show full customization of my final project.

Final Pitch – Profile/Portfolio

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Goals: For my final project, I have decided that I’d really like to add on to my current website and make it a portfolio/profile page about myself for potential future employers. I want to make this kind of website page because I believe that as a Public Relations professional, it is crucial to have some sort of landing page that speaks to your skills – not only from a communications perspective, but from a coding/web design perspective (especially when I can say that I have designed the page myself!). The audience of this page will be current and future coworkers, my networks, visitors to my LinkedIn page, and future employers who will view my page through an application submission. I hope that this will make me look like a robust and mature professional in my career, to be able to provide a landing page for easy-to-access content to my resume, portfolio, and more.

Audience: The audience of this page will be current and future coworkers, my networks, visitors to my LinkedIn page, and future employers who will view my page through an application submission. I hope that this will make me look like a robust and mature professional in my career, to be able to provide a landing page for easy-to-access content to my resume, portfolio, and more.

How I’ll Achieve My Goals:

Theme: Lighthouse

Track: I will be doing mostly front-end modifications, with some back end tweaking.

Planned Modifications:

  • A contact form in the footer of each page that will send an email to me alerting me of the submission.
  • Display an embedded document (my resume) on my website.
  • Add images of me and my previous work.
  • I will add link to my social media accounts as a way for website visitors to find me.
  • Add a Google font to make the text more unique and interesting.
  • Hover over menu options at the top of the screen in a particular color.
  • Add a Google map displaying my international work and travel.
  • Additional theme, color, and design element changes, including modifications to the navigation bar.

URL: lucynegash.com

PHP…Easier Said Than Done

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For our PHP Codecademy assignment this week (though I accidentally completed it early!), I was pleasantly surprised as to how simple moving through the different modules were. Greg pointed out in class that it definitely could be our growing knowledge of various coding languages, which I certainly hope is right, but I also think that this particular Codecademy assignment was also a lot less buggy than jQuery, so I could have just been feeling the pains from completing those projects in a timely manner.

Though the assignment on Codecademy was simple, I found that incorporating it into our website page was very difficult. First, I wasn’t even sure what kind of PHP I would be able to add in a simple manner onto my page (should I try to code something to show up on the page? Or just add back-end elements that wouldn’t be seen on the client side?). After Googling I was able to piece together a very rough contact form, but the syntax for coding this also proved difficult. It might have been easier had I done the Codecademy assignment closer to the date the project was due, but I felt more in the dark about starting this assignment than I had in other previous ones. Perhaps this can be discussed more in class.

Final Project: I have decided that I’d really like to add on to my current website and make it a portfolio/profile page about myself for potential future employers. I’m excited to dive back into HTML and CSS (languages that feel a lot more comfortable to me) to build out the bones of the page, and then do some digging about what additional elements I can include with PHP, jQuery, and more to make my page more robust and custom. Looking forward to seeing everyone else’s projects as well!

Midterm Analysis – New Project, New Languages

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My interview with Emmanuel Kenabantu was a fascinating take on how coding fits into real-life scenarios within the scope of work needed for various businesses — in his case, his non-profit organization clients. SharePoint was not a program I was familiar with, and I definitely had to do my research pre- and post-interview to find out more about what the program was and what its capabilities were. Once I was able to get that information under my belt (it was more digestible than I thought it would be), it was very interesting to hear how Emmanuel used coding and web design to tweak the forms, documents, etc. as he needed.

One of the programs that he mentioned using was C# (C Sharp), a coding language we have not yet learned and I’m guessing likely won’t be within the scope of this class. However, I wanted to know more and some quick googling and asking of friends helped me learn more about it and what it is mostly used for. ASP.net was another unfamiliar term, so I had to look into that as well.

One of the biggest things that surprised me was how small his team was on this project, and how quickly he was able to get it done with such a short-staffed group. Perhaps this is common in the non-profit world especially, but I would assume that a project of this magnitude (though perhaps it is not actually as complicated as it seems?) would take a lot longer to complete. I was definitely impressed by his ability to make quick work of this assignment, and present it cleanly and without bugs to his clients.

I definitely want to go back and ask him more questions about his background as well as how he got interested in coding and web design, and have inquired further with him — I hope to hear back soon and update my midterm post as soon as I possibly can.

Midterm: Emmanuel Kenabantu, SharePoint engineer

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For my midterm I interviewed Emmanuel Kenabantu, a SharePoint engineer at OSIBeyond, LLC, an IT consulting firm that primarily works with non-profit organizations. He works remotely as a SharePoint consultant on various development projects for their clients. It is a web-based, collaborative platform that integrates well with Microsoft Office. It is a relatively new technology that is sold as a document management and storage system, but the product is highly configurable and usage varies substantially between organizations.

Q: Describe your project and the guidelines given to create it. 

A: Our assigned project was to design a SharePoint web application to allow external and internal users the ability to review and electronically sign documents. The client was using SharePoint 2010 to run their intranet site and wanted to leverage and design an extranet site to allowed them to collaborate with other partners on various projects. The entire review and approval process would be automated and tracked for auditing purposes. The instructions for the development of the platform are bulleted below:

  • The customer should be able to fill out a form and submit it.
  • A workflow would be triggered and notifications would be sent to a reviewer.
  • Once the reviewer verifies and approves the data in the form, an email notification would be sent to their partners (external users).
  • The external users would review the details in the form and provide a consensus.
  • One designated external user would submit the consensus.
  • The system will notify the clients about the consensus and generate a PDF document of the form.
  • The system would automatically start the electronic signature collection process.
  • Once the document is signed by both the clients and partners, it is archived and permissions are set to read-only.

Q: What approach did you take the design the application? What languages did you use?

A: We designed the asp.net (an open-source server side web application framework), and some of the functionalities of the program were written with the programming language C Sharp (C#), a server-side language. We also used Javascript and jQuery to build the functionality behind the form.

Q: How long did the project take to complete overall?

A: Since we are working with a small team, the project only had 2 members – the project manager was in charge of interacting with the customers using the program as well as gathering requirements, and I was the application architecture manager in charge of design, coding and testing the final form.

Q: What were some of the greatest challenges you faced in creating the program and working with other team members to craft the final product?

A: The greatest challenge has been designing a system that supported different types of browsers, such as Google Chrome, Firefox, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera, etc. This challenge was due to the fact that we could not control which browser external users would be using to access, and interact with, our system as well as figuring out ways to work around the SharePoint browser limitations. We had to test our final form against all potential browsers and make sure that all browser-specific issues were resolved before presenting our final product to the clients that would be using it.

Q: What were some lessons or takeaways you learned in the creation of this project?
A: One of the greatest lessons we learned was to always take into account user behaviors. It is important to do several runs of testing with our customers that will be using the system, rather than just testing with our internal sources. Learning this throughout the process helped us design a more user-friendly interface with features that increased usability and accessibility for our clients and users of the program.

 

Q: How does this project contribute to both your overall career and to your industry as a whole?

A: As a SharePoint engineer, I am consistently looking for ways to better the experience of my clients and users of the interface by making things more efficient and user-friendly. My job is to identify customer needs from a technological design standpoint, and use my knowledge of coding and web design to meet their needs. In designing this project in particular (and other similar SharePoint forms like it), I can eliminate repeating steps by simply designing a program that takes all of the guesswork out of repeating form submissions and working on projects collaboratively. This kind of problem solving and shared work is especially good for the non-profits we work with because it helps business run more smoothly and efficiently, and housing a variety of forms and projects together in one place allows users to access them remotely, even on their mobile or tablet devices. This content management system (CMS) is a great way for non-profits to manage their documents with a program that provides functionality that greatly outweighs its cost.

 

JavaScript > jQuery

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This week’s assignment was very difficult, and I felt quite unprepared for the task at hand, even with the jQuery Code Academy assignment under my belt. I also noticed that I was prompted with multiple notifications from Codecademy alerting me to jQuery’s lessons being updated this summer — which I’m guessing may possibly link to the fact that it seemed like the lesson was very bug-heavy.

There were multiple instances in the lessons where I struggled to find the answer, and the hints proved to be unhelpful. I hope they fix this bug soon, as it took me twice as long to complete this assignment than usual (and they took me forever to begin with!)

As for the slide show assignment, I felt as if I relied on Googling and researching the answers I’d need to make things work instead of relying on the information we have learned in previous classes. Also, I still did not feel comfortable enough to use jQuery to complete parts of the JavaScript assignments, so I stuck with JavaScript to complete it and even then I found many parts of getting the slideshow to work challenging.

Somehow, I was able to make the slides rotate through, but it was an arduous effort to try and get everything to work together…I’m still not even sure how I was able to get it. Hopefully we can work through lots of people’s work to discuss challenges that I’m sure were felt across the class!

Midterm Preview: I will be interviewing a friend of mine with a extensive developing background, who built a website for a counselor/therapist practice in the Washington, DC area.