Week 7 & 8 at Flatiron

Week 7

Presenting Muse at Flatiron Presents

Finally finished my part in Flatiron Presents. Every Tuesday here at Flatiron School, 3-4 pairs (2 web, 2 mobile) of students present an app/ feature that they have collaborated on. My partner unfortunately dropped from the program around Week 4, but I tried making the most out of the last 2 weeks and made a working app that I feel proud about.

I made a journaling app that allows users to fully capture a moment by pinning their currently playing song to a journal entry for future playback. The frameworks I used to make this app work include MPMediaQuery, MPMusicPlayerController, and Parse as a backend solution for saving entries and music playlists.

I attached below the keynote and demo video that I used for 'Flatiron Presents'. Check it out!

https://leojkwan.nyc3.cdn.digitaloceanspaces.com/muse_keynote_video.m4v

Looking at the slides I prepared post-presentation, I am impressed with how much I've learned in just 6 weeks, and I am equally humbled to learn how complex a 'simple app' could become. I’m starting to believe there is no such thing as a good simple app. Well ... there is this.

Week 8

Slumping

Week 8 was a tough one.

The week was mostly unproductive and it was mostly on me. I must have been burning out but I started the week off mentally unprepared. It sucks because a day wasted in a sped up educational environment like Flatiron School is very costly in the literal sense. 15k for 12 weeks. What's that each day?

It wasn’t a very motivating week either. We are approaching project mode, and it’s obvious that the labs assigned this week aren’t as important as the concepts we covered over the last 6 weeks.

It’s ironic that I am completely out of sync this week because I've been looking forward to learning about UI scroll views, and it was set for this week. I think I almost knocked out that lecture because I was so tired. I don’t know what hit me, but I’m making it a priority to get it down over the weekend.

Thursday Afternoon

Tim announced who we will work with for our final project this afternoon.

We are the first cohort in Flatiron's school that did not partner with an outside company for our final project. Instead, we're randomly broken up into teams of 4 to make our own app. Our team will come up with three ideas we can collectively find interesting and worthwhile, and our instructors select the project they feel is challenging enough for a 3-week span.

I am very happy with the teams that were assembled. We have a strong group because I believe everyone on the team works well collaboratively.

We decided that our main task manager will be WorkFlowy; our means of communication over anything project related will be over Slack. I’ve use Workflowy regularly and I think it’s terrific for small group projects. Besides the cool transitions between task lists, the app is pretty simple, and you can do so much with the blank slate platform they provide. The team was on board so we’re running with it.

No time to fall behind next week— we're officially in project mode. I won't have as much time to blog for the next 3 weeks, but I'll follow up on how our final project ends up. It'll be good.

On to Week 9.