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Austin code's an App in 10 days.

A detailed account of a Fastlane process...

AustinS28

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Thought this could be fun. I'm not sure what I am going to do with this app. In 10 days it will not have the features that are worth a paid subscription, but it should have enough functionality for a good user experience.

A lot has changed. My old business was not Fastlane. It was draining the life out of me even if the money was good. I disolved it.

I spent the past few months living off of my savings and coding about 80-100/hours per week, soaking up everything I could. I put my life(social life that is) on hold for this, but it's great.

Last September was the first time I ever touched any code

Fast forward, I got accepted into a coding school that is very competitive. I finish up next week.

I can program in Ruby and Javascript, query a db in SQL, use the Rails framework and know the React.js and Redux libraries which is what I am building my front end in.

I am currently building the MVP features of a fitness app; I started Tuesday, I need to present it Friday of next week.

I think a lot of people think of coding as static HTML pages with CSS styling. That's just the tip of the iceberg. It's the fun stuff, but the backend and rendering things on the front end is where the headaches live.

I'll make updates when I roll out new features.

Day 1

 
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Caramel

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I think a lot of people think of coding as static HTML pages with CSS styling.

To be fair I don't think anyone thinks like that. People either don't have enough technical knowledge to know what HTML and CSS even are and what they're for.
If they do know then they also know that HTML and CSS won't build a "system" like an app.

Sorry, not trying to be nit-picky.



I'm curious what the status of the app will be in 10 days!

Good luck & keep grinding!
 

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AustinS28

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So what do we have today?

Added a few features, setup some error handling.

User can now search for exercises with an autocomplete function I coded up. Added a click handler to my li items so a user can select exercises from the list provided.

I added toggling. In the second video if you created a workout, a new element would render next to create workout with the exercise component. Now if you create a workout, the create workout component unmounts and the exercise selector component mounts in its place.

This weekend I hope to be able to add results to the workout and exercise selected. It's a little tricky because of how I am passing things to the state and how workout results is essentially a join table between workouts and exercises.


Below is how I handled the autocomplete, I am sure there is a cleaner solution, but I only have a week left to get the MVPs created.
I'll spend a lot of time after this refactoring, and adding new features, polished design.

Edit....I'll upload a screen shot of the code later...seems I can't format it correctly on the board.
Er5y7

Er5y7
 
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Huracan

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Would Facebook's license model where the React license is invalidated if you ever bring patent claims against Facebook. Effect your decision to use it on the font end?
 

PatrickWho

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Great thread!

It looks like a bootcamp can really pay off. I started coding back in 2015, but I went the Treehouse, Front End Masters, PluralSight route.

I'm excited to see this finished!
 
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AustinS28

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Would Facebook's license model where the React license is invalidated if you ever bring patent claims against Facebook. Effect your decision to use it on the font end?

Great question, something I've never thought of. I will look into this and report back. As of now and my current goal, I see it as a non issue.

Great thread!

It looks like a bootcamp can really pay off. I started coding back in 2015, but I went the Treehouse, Front End Masters, PluralSight route.

I'm excited to see this finished!

Thanks man. Boot Camp is unreal. It's been the fastest few months of my life. I am lucky to get to the gym 4 times per week or grab a beer with my buds on a Saturday. Most of my waking hours have been spent coding. The pace is incredibly fast. The 80/100 per week commitment wasn't a lie. Going in I thought, impossible, there won't be that much work. I was dead wrong. I was questioning my decision to go early on; I was not used to the intensity and workload. As of now it's been one of the best decisions I've ever made. I enjoy it more each day I am there.

I am looking forward to finishing soon and getting some normalcy back in life. I have gotten a greater appreciation for things I took for granted, like my friends and family, working out. Things I can't indulge in as much these days if at all.
 

AustinS28

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Day 5 - Spent about 6 hours on the project today. I think I'll be taking a break for the rest of the day to hit the gym, then get together with some friends to watch the fight tonight.

So what happened today?

Added another toggle feature. Once a user submits an exercise, they are presented a form to fill out results.

I had to work for a few hours to get my state to properly store the information I needed to pass down to each component. You can see with the headers that the state is holding the correct information. When you are brought to the add exercise section, the workout name is in the title, when you are sent to the result form, your exercise is in the title.


I'm really liking rendering everything on the Users Profile page, no redirects.

Tomorrow, I'd like to be able to submit results. Right now my action creator isn't formatted properly and I decided to call it a day before fixing it.

I need to then add some buttons and functions to add more exercises to a workout.

I want a search bar in the exercise container, and the ability to click on a workout and on that same page next to the logged workouts, show the latest, or selected workout with all of its exercises and results.
 

AustinS28

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Changed style, more things are persisting in my state so I can render the workout display column next to the workouts list. Things are saving to the DB correctly, you can now add multiple exercises to a workout and multiple set results to an exercise. Toggling is working perfectly.

Next it's time to get rid of a few bugs, and render the actual workout results a member is putting into the database to the screen.

 
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AustinS28

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I'll be doing more work tonight, but figured I'd post the update now. Tonight's work will be more or less debugging some issues that aren't noticeable.


Today showcases everything coming together in the MVP. We can now view the workouts we have been creating. I have a lot of conditionals written on what to render and they're working nicely.

Debugging tonight -

Exercises are predefined; the thought behind this was features I'll be adding after the MVP. If a user could make up exercise names, it'd make it virtually impossible to utilize the features I plan to create. They're rather unique and I'm very excited about them. I'll share them once they're built. This will definitely be past the 10 day timeline. That said, you error out if you try to type an exercise input that doesn't exist in the database. I'll be writing some logic on the front end that throws an error and doesn't submit if the exercise doesn't exist. It'll probably be rather simple and check the user input as I iterate over the array of exercises.

This is a bad one. I need to add a protected route so a user cannot go to another users profile page. This will be a temp fix, because at the moment I can update my workout log on another users page. It's super simple to get to another users profile page when you know how the frontend routes are setup....

I need to get my duration inputs to append a 0 onto the front of the user's input. If someone ran a marathon in 4 hours 15 minutes and 9 seconds, it should show up as 4:15:09...currently it'd be 4:15:9...

Tomorrow I'll be completing my AWS config so we can get some profile pics up there. Then I am just about done before some other minor tweaks. I may add another feature, but we'll see how I am on time. I'm on target for a Friday completion of MVPs.
 

PatrickWho

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Looking great!

Was learning AWS a fair part of the bootcamp or would you learn just enough to get your app live?
 
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AustinS28

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Love the thread mate. I've just started learning to code (java) for the last month so its great to see where you can get to.

Dude, get your reps in and you can do a lot in a year! Good on you for starting up Java.

Practice, practice practice. It's never easy and there will always be bugs, persevere through that and your knowledge base will continue to expand.

Looking great!

Was learning AWS a fair part of the bootcamp or would you learn just enough to get your app live?

Thanks man!

Most of the material here is introduced and then we are left on our own to figure it out. I had maybe 30 mins of instruction on AWS. It's probably not complicated, but it hasn't been a pressing priority. Even today I'm more interested in other things so we'll see where I get to.
 

AustinS28

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So I am finished with the basics. I want one more feature before Friday. I am going to attempt to make a search function that will pull statistics from a User's workout. The two stats will be heaviest load lifted and most volume lifted. If you pick bench press, the idea is to fetch your one rep max or the workout where you lifted the most pounds with everything added together. We will see if this happens in that short of time, but I'm rather confident.

Here's a complete walk through.


Sign up new user -
Add stats -
Add profile pic -
Create workout -
View workout -
Delete workout -

All of this take place in one central hub, no redirects, I am just toggling different components and using callbacks to toggle the parent class when a child is updated and I need the user's profile page to change.

One thing I want to do is remove the stats a user hasn't entered yet so we are not left with blank stats under the profile view. This will be an easy fix.

Just found this thread - Automated: A guide to AWS and the possibilities of scalability (Code and Software Architecture)

I've been deep diving in managing my own servers and deployment, and I have found the process really enjoyable and empowering. I'd be interested to hear of your experience with AWS.

Thanks for the link. I will definitely take a look at that thread and post my thoughts on AWS when I gain a little more experience. It was rather easy to setup just for what I am doing.
 
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AustinS28

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3:32 am, search feature complete, it was a pain in the a$$ due to a few reasons.

My state wasn't updating properly. My workout IDs are strings in state and when I would remove a workout, I was trying to delete the workout from state passing back an ID as an integer. This didn't cause any issues until this search feature because it was throwing errors when it would come across undefined workouts, if I deleted them. They were undefined because they didn't exist in the database, but still persisted in state. It was an easy fix converting the IDs to strings.

I had to redo my schema. I added a type to exercises.

I basically iterated over the results of every workout a user had, picked out the weight lifting exercises based on exercise type and then stored each exercise as a key in a hash. The hash would update it's value if an exercise's result was a heavier weight lifted than the current value in the hash.

This was about 8 hours tonight. I am sleeping in tomorrow. I'll preview the features tomorrow and hopefully we have a product Friday. Looking forward to really building this all year. It's a great feeling to create your ideas.
 

AustinS28

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Alright so I am basically done, tomorrow is Day 10. I am satisfied with what I will present Friday.

Here are the new features I added the past day. We have the profile pic upload, the graphing of exercises. If you search bench press you'll receive your max bench press and a graph of all the weights you've previously benched. I think that was a nice touch.


Little Recap


First two days I got authentication up and running.

We needed to store a session token in the users browser so a user could remain logged in.

Passwords needed to be hashed and salted and not saved to the Database.

During this time I set up my schema, creating tables in the database. Set up my routes, models controllers and views at this point too.

The MCV’s changed throughout the project but I initially started with a good base.

Next step was setting up my frontend with ajax requests, actions, and reducers to normalize state. It’s still not as clean as I’d like. I also brought the current user to the window so they’d remain logged in on page refreshes.

After that I added components and the rest was just implementing features.

I learned so much. This is my first project with React and the first app I’ve built.

I went into this knowing very little and now feel very comfortable with React and Redux.

The graphs were an awesome add on. I used a module chart.js and the only challenge was correctly storing the data I wanted in the graph into the object that needed to be passed to the chart.

I would iterate over the exercises completed by a member and store in a hash(object in javascript) all the necessary data needed to render the statistics for each exercise a user performed.

I had some click handlers to retrieve information from my list items to choose which exercise based on name to put into the chart depending on where the user clicked. Then toggled the screen to show the charted data.

That’s basically the simplified version.

CSS styling was going on everyday.

This was a 10 day project to get some MVP’s up.

Next step is to turn this into a business. I guess I’ll continue to update once bigger features roll out.
 
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AustinS28

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I thought I was done, but I can't stop adding features.

I added a leaderboard that will render a sorted list from greatest to least of members and their results for a particular weight lift. It will serve as a ranking.

I added a pie chart which will display the amount each exercise is being performed by the total amount of users.


This will be it before my presentation tomorrow.
 
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AustinS28

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Thanks dude!

I glanced over the article this morning. I don't think it'll be too hard implement. You're totally right, It'll leave the app more polished and give it a nice feel.

Absolutely. Animations and UX are the secret sauce, that turns regular applications to prestigious looking ones.
 
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