CSSI Day 3: Web Development with JavaScript

View of Lake Washington from the morning shuttle!
You can see Mount Rainier from the background.

This morning began feeling even earlier than the first, but we all piled onto the shuttle on-time for our second day of programming at the Google office. Once again, we started off the day with breakfast at the Sudo Cafe. Then, we began the lesson on JavaScript, which is a more advanced programming language used in web development, for creating dynamic, interactive content on websites. In fact, we learned that Google Maps is one of the most complex applications that is coded using JavaScript, due to its three-dimensional rotations (e.g. Street View) and many other features.

Although I had no previous experience with JavaScript, I found that learning some Python through Codecademy really helped me with my understanding; JavaScript is more syntax-heavy at times, but its basic structures are quite similar. We learned a lot about how to respond to different user interactions such as clicking buttons or hovering over text or images, with actions including animations and colour change, etc.

After working with Google Chrome's own built-in JavaScript console, we used jQuery (which simplifies JavaScript implementation into HTML) to add JavaScript into webpages. Through this, we were able to combine the HTML and CSS that we learned yesterday with the more complex and interactive elements we learned today.   

In between all the excitement of the day, I got to try on Google Glass! It was really cool; the screen in the corner was a lot bigger than I expected, and I got to look through all the different verbal commands that Glass could execute.

I'm also getting a lot more used to the MacBooks that we're using; while I'm a Windows user at heart (are the "control", "option", and "command" buttons really all necessary?), the Macs are very sleek and fast, not to mention the amazing graphics.

Our final project of the day for JavaScript was to create a Photo Search Engine, which takes in a keyword and searches through Flickr for relevant photos. The best part was that the search engine used real-time data from Flickr, meaning that searches could be updated based on user uploads to Flickr. There were many features that we wanted to add and we encountered quite a few complicated bugs, but in the end we managed to work them out together. Tomorrow we're continuing to work on more complex projects with JavaScript, which I'm glad for because it means involving more hands-on coding.