Presenting Goalizr.com

Goalizr is Live!

It's been quiet here on the blog, and for good reason! With less than a day left here at camp, I was able to get my personal project live and working online. Check it out at Goalizr.com!

You can register for an account and start adding your own goals and activities, or login with the Demo account to have a look around. I've added some sample goals and activities to give an idea of how it works. Here's the login...

User: Test
Password: password

I had to reign in my initial scope for the application to get it ready to publish in time, but I'm proud of this release because of what I've learned and the problems I had to solve to get it where it is.

I also want to announce the launch of another project I helped out on, Csharper.in. My classmate, Vicky Goldstein, created this really cool Jeopardy-style game to help people learn C# and ASP.NET related terms and definitions.

It's been quite a ride the last 12 weeks, going from drinking from a firehose to now putting out fires on my own web application. I can say now with certainty, that attending this camp has been the best thing I've ever done for my career. I look forward to getting started with a good company next year, but for now I'm thrilled to be going home to see my wife Anna, and my two kids, Will & Finley!

Goalizr Sneak Peek

Goalizr Frontend

There's nothing like a deadline to push you through late nights working on a project. Today was presentation day, so those of us with personal projects have been putting in a lot of time over the last few weeks to get them ready for today. Although I've got three more weeks to work on it, I still wanted to get it pretty good shape for today.

So far, I've got the frontend website at a good stopping point for now. For the remaining three weeks I'm going to focus on finishing out the backend, along with implementing user authentication so the site will allow users to create their own sets of goals, activities and such. Here's what I have so far:

Dashboard > Goals Page

This page shows all the goals, with data populating from the database for each goal. You can create new goals, edit, or delete goals as you wish. On this page I have a working search function which allows you to search through goals by the title or motivation, and a sort feature that allows you to view goals that are ending soonest, or latest. There's also working pagination that limits the number of goals per page.

Some of these things were trickier than I thought they would be coming from more of a plug-and-play background such as WordPress. But the payoff for this trickiness is more power and flexibility. And, not to mention that I'm learning how to build things from scratch and not depending solely on plugins to add functionality to a website.

Dashboard Main Page

Other pages for Activities and Emotions are working, similar to the Goals page, but the main Dashboard for the backend is still pretty much in prototype. The data for the charts is all hard coded in for now, but hopefully by the time I finish up here at camp, I'll have a solid beta version ready to go live.

Here's the development technology I've used so far:

ASP.NET, MVC5, C#, Razor, LINQ, Entity Framework 6, HTML5, CSS3, JavaScript, jQuery, Team Foundation Server, Bootstrap 3

Bugs Be Gone!

Week 3 has been all about jumping into an existing project, finding your way around the code, and making changes or tweaks in the HTML, CSS, or C# to fix bugs or make things look better. It has been great practice for troubleshooting and getting around in a big application. Visual Studio's Page Inspector tool, as well as the search function of the Solution Explorer have been a big help for me. Working together and individually, we've been able to fine tune some of the features originally built by the two previous troops.

This week I also started working on my personal project, Goalizr. Using Entity Framework code-first, I created my classes and database, and then seeded the database with some initial data for testing. My tables include Goals, Activities, and Emotions. I also needed to create some intermediary classes for GoalActivities and ActivityEmotions, so that I can associate multiple Activities to each Goal, and likewise, multiple Emotions to each Activity. We'll be busy the next few weeks creating the Fundio admin dashboard, but I want to keep working on Goalizr when I have the time so that I can have a solid application in my portfolio by the time I finish camp.

We also had a hiring day on Thursday, where recruiters and potential employers are invited to the school to conduct interviews and give us the opportunity to meet with folks in the industry face to face. I met some top-notch people from companies in the Houston area. One company, Assemble Systems, has a web application product that integrates 3D CAD drawings into an online viewer for Building Information Management. As I get closer to the end of camp, I'll definitely be looking into companies like this that combine CAD & GIS into web-based software solutions. There is some amazing new technology that's being developed right now, and I'd love to be a part of it.

On a sad note, we said goodbye to some of the graduates of one of the other troops. They were a huge help to us these last three weeks, and I wish them the best of luck on their own new career paths.

Week 2 Progress & Looking Ahead

Goalizr.com - Making Goals Happen

Classes continue to explore the tools and techniques used by professional web developers to build dependable and robust applications. Every night we work on homework assignments that can take up to 3 hours to complete. In the morning we review the previous night's assignment, and then move right into new material for the rest of the day.

Our class works really well together, finding solutions to problems and sharing resources to help build our skills. And, as always, the instructors and other troops are more than willing to offer help when needed. Thanks everyone! I feel like all the collaboration will give us a leg-up in our careers as web developers.

Every day has been a challenge, but also rewarding. I'm starting to get really excited about bringing all this together and start working on our class and personal projects. I've got a couple of ideas for a personal project. One is an online/mobile goal tracker app with novel features that utilize the lastest research in goal achievement. It has to be something I can get up and running (think Alpha) in the last three weeks of camp, so I'll post more information when we get closer.