Perception

These last few months have been tremendously busy for me, mostly with the workload of school projects and assignments, but it’s been largely enjoyable which is probably why it seems to have passed so quickly. I haven’t neglected writing, although most of my blogging juice has been spent on writing for a blog for one of my modules. This entry comes at a time that is slightly too early for reflections on the semester, but I’ll just like to write about the fair number of web development projects I’ve been involved in since the start of the year, which has made these four months pretty fulfilling.

The first one for the year was the aforementioned blog, and what I tried to do with it was an approach much like that of Dustin Curtis. There were no requirements for the platform or design of the blog, so I took in my own hands to craft out each entry manually, taking the chance to explore different styles of displaying content. Of course, the amount of effort required for each entry would ultimately render this endeavour difficult to sustain as the semester progressed, and the lack of much creativity in the later designs is quite telling of this. Nonetheless, it was fun, although each entry meant that I had to not just write but code as well. I got to learn how to set up an RSS feed and install Disqus for the site, so there was some learning too.

I covered the Facebook and Google Wave projects in the last two posts, but I would like to mention them again due to the significance of these development projects. I learnt a lot of deploying an FBML application within Facebook, and the accompanying Facebook-centric languages and APIs as well. I’m currently working on a Facebook Connect application, and it’s no doubt this interest stemmed from the earlier Facebook assignment. The Google Wave API is something I’m hoping to take another crack at soon, and this new paradigm of real-time applications is too compelling to resist. Why I find these two projects of importance is because these are two more platforms that I’ll now be able to develop for, and not to mention they make good résumé fodder as well.

I’ve built a number of sites for module-related projects as well, and these have given me the opportunity to revisit and improve my current knowledge on HTML, CSS and Javascript. I’m a firm believer of the ‘practice makes perfect’ mantra, and I think the initial mundane steps when building sites from scratch is a necessary routine I’ll have to get used to in order to be iterate sites quicker in future. I’ve been able to play around with more jQuery for these projects, which I still think is an amazing tool, but there are still a lot of possibilities I’ve yet to try. I also learnt to use gothere.sg‘s API, which is quite comprehensively documented and is something I’d like to use more in future projects.

The last site I built, which was probably the most trivial and most enjoyable one to do, was a shared gift to one of the most awesome people in the School of Computing, and what I tried to do with this was to mimic a Twistori-like display. More specifically, it got me thinking on what other cool ways could be used to display text data, and a possible implementation of this would be to visualize the updates being sent through sgBEAT. Also, the attempted humour on that site was inspired from Chuck Norris Facts.

The upside to all this is not just experience, but at the end of it I have a bunch of code that could possibly be reused in in subsequent web development endeavours. I’ve also been able to explore new styles in web design, which is also very much a passion of mine. I’ve already taken the next step and am currently working on something which I think is pretty cool, so this upcoming summer break is definitely not going to be a boring one.