As I write this, I’m entering into the second week of capstone projects at Portland Code School. The lectures are done, although the learning continues, as we use our knowledge of full-stack JavaScript to build our own web apps!

My group consists of Nate, Curt, and myself. We went though the Foundations Course together, and our learning and collaboration styles work well together. I’m really happy that we all agreed to work on the web app that I proposed - it’s been cool to see it taking shape! We’re building a site called snapOR. As a hiker and photographer, I spend a lot of time going between different websites to look up cool hikes, and researching the kind of photos that people have taken there. Wouldn’t it be nice to have all of that information - hikes and photos - in a single website? Our web app is the answer to that!

We’re using Jade, Foundation, and Backbone.js for front-end; and Orchestrate.io for the back-end. We have some Express server happening, but a lot of it’s going to be in Backbone, since we’re creating a single-page app at the suggestion of our project advisors, James and Ken from CSGPro. We’re using APIs from Google Maps, Oregon State Parks, and Flickr, and we’ll add in Weather Underground if we get to Version 2! This project has really helped me bring together my code knowledge from the two months of class, and I’m really proud to be contributing to the front-end and back-end work.

This week, I’m digging into Backbone. My grasp of it is still shaky, and I’ve spent part of my time trying to find coherent tutorials on using Backbone for a single-page app. It’s slowly coming together, and I have a feeling that most of my time this week will be devoted to understanding and building with Backbone.

On that note, it’s time to dive back into the wild world of Backbone - wish me luck! (And if you have any resources that helped you learn Backbone, please send it my way! You can tweet me at @angelariggs_).