Over the last couple months, I have spent the most of my time with Angular 5/6.  For most of the winter/spring I spent my time with various Udemy tutorials.  Since roughly mid June, I have been more hands on, working on my Angular 6 project Zzpace.

While at the Toronto Star, I was given the opportunity to work on a Java project despite not being proficient when the project begun.  Over roughly two years on that project my Java skills slowly improved, but I still have plenty to learn.

Since roughly mid July, I have been spending some time on various Java exercises on Hacker Rank.  The site has plenty of exercises in Java areas such as Arrays, Sorting and String Manipulation.

Finally, going forward I hope to do several of these exercises a week to improve my Java skills!

After spending a few weeks on an Angular 6 project Zzpace I’ve finally added it to the project section of my website!

It was an interesting experience finally getting hands on with an Angular 6 project.  By no means is this project done and I will be slowly adding new features to it in upcoming weeks.

In Late February I took a 3 day course CED-Level 1 which was offered by theblockchain hub at the York University campus, which I haven’t been to in 5 years since I graduated from Seneca.

The course is based off of Ethereum, each day we had a different instructor but the main-chunk of the course involved Solidity and Smart Contracts.

After the 3 lectures we had a week to finish a smart contract, my contract was done with Lawrence who worked at RBC Captial Markets.  We did a smart contract based off of Interest Rate Swaps.

The course was fun to get a small taste of Ethereum, Solidity and blockchain development, but for now I think I will continue to spend the next few weeks on javascript.

Last Thursday was my last day at the Toronto Star in which I left on my own terms.  It was a fun 2.5 year run getting some hands on experience with Angular 1.5, AEM, Java, and React.  But given that our latest project “CQ5.6 upgrade to AEM6.2” had finished in the early Winter and I figured it was simply time to move on.

My rough plan for the Winter is to lay-low for a few months and slowly ramp up the job hunting search come March/April.  During this break I hope to take a vacation or two, hit the gym more consistently, take some blockchain coding courses and improve my Angular/React/Mongo skills.

During December I plan on taking a few Udemy Javascript courses focusing on Angular4/5, React, Redux, Node and MongoDB.  Each course is intended to take around 20 hours, so ill try to do one course a week roughly.

1.Angular 5 (formerly Angular 2) – The Complete Guide

2.Angular (Angular 2+) & NodeJS – The MEAN Stack Guide

3.Node with React: Fullstack Web Development

4.Modern React with Redux

I haven’t done much Angular in roughly 3 years, so I figure it would be a good time to get caught up on what has changed since Angular1.  I’ve done a bunch of React at the Star over the last 2 years, but we don’t use Redux, and it wouldn’t hurt to learn how that works.

Last week I finally started the course Algorithmic Toolbox which is part one in a six course series Data Structures and Algorithms Specialization which is offered by UC San Diego on coursera.

This first level class is 5 weeks long, and each week has roughly 5-10 hours of studies/work a week.

What have I been up to?

When I got hired at the Toronto Star, my understanding was that it would be a front-end job mostly dealing with Javascript.

As of January 2016 I was given the opportunity to work with Java, as that was the primary back-end language used for the Toronto Star CMS which was CQ5.6 as of January 2016. At that point I did not touch Java for probably 4-5 years since my time at Seneca College.

Over the next couple months I am going to be working on a personal project involving Java/Javascript(Angular/React). This project will be called Zpace and will be a fictional space travel company.

Also later on in the summer I will be try out some Coursera courses involving Data Structures & Algorithms – https://www.coursera.org/specializations/data-structures-algorithms

Over the next 2-3 months its time to pick up some Linux based back-end languages.

First in line is Ruby/Ruby on Rails!

As in the past I will be doing some code school courses to get an intro to Ruby!

The standard Bootstrap Navigation includes a list of items and whichever item has the class of active is given a grey background to indicate it is the selected/active item in the navigation. Creating this navigation with Ember came to be a bit of a struggle, but behold I found a fix in the Ember.js github issues section with a solution.

The HTML code for the nav:

{{#link-li}}
{{#link-to ‘local’}}
Local
{{/link-to}}
{{/link-li}}

Some Javascript needs to be added to create the linkli component which handles assigning the class active to the current page/nav item.

App.LinkLiComponent = Em.Component.extend({
tagName: ‘li’,
classNameBindings: [‘active’],
active: function() {
return this.get(‘childViews’).anyBy(‘active’);
}.property(‘childViews.@each.active’)
});

After some thinking I will create a fictional news site done mostly in Bootstrap with Ember.

I hope to also take some features from two EmberJS sites that I use alot The Score and Twitch.

My deadline is to have this project done in 2 weeks(By May 1st) and roughly 50~ hrs spread over this time frame. I will update my daily progress on my github page.