We will meet in the board room at 25N, in Geneva, at 5:45pm on October 19, 2018.
Never been there? Here is a Map
Meeting Agenda:
Tonight’s meeting will focus on continuing the development of the WeatherWear Web Service and the Swift app to consume the Web Service.
String Interpolation in Swift: the term “string interpolation” refers to creating a character string that pulls values out of one or more variables and combines those values with other characters to form a string. The entire expression is enclosed in double quotes and each variable within the string is preceded by a backslash and enclosed in parentheses. Example “Hello \(name)” will print “Hello Gandalf” if Gandalf is the value in the variable name.
Optional Variables in Swift: Swift is strongly typed and insists that if there is a possibility that a variable (or constant) may not have a value at some point when the program is running, then it must be declared as optional. The variable may then either contain a value of the declared type or may be nil. The purpose is to avoid the null reference errors that can occur in other languages when someone tries to use a variable without a value. Declare a variable as optional by putting a question mark at the end of the type such as our WeatherForecast:
var forecast: WeatherForecast?
When using the values in an optional variable, the variable needs to be “unwrapped”, like removing it from a box. Consider a cardboard box labelled “Weather Forecast”; you can open it up to find a forecast object or you can find nothing, so you can’t treat it as if there is always a value there. There are several ways to unwrap and to check what is in the box, but for this problem we will force unwrapping explicitly.
The Problem with String Interpolation with Optionals:
When we tried to display the temperature in either Fahrenheit or Celsius by drilling down through the many nested levels of objects in our WeatherForecast we were getting this warning and the text on screen was gibberish:
The fix is to explicitly unwrap the values at each object level by putting an exclamation point in place of the question mark in multiple places, i.e., after each object name within the long nested object:
Last Friday, on a day off from school, 9 of our members enjoyed an amazing day at Jellyvision, getting an inside look at what it is like to work at this tech company in a very wide variety of different roles, technical, business, and creative. Many of the brilliant and talented people at Jellyvision gave their time to make this a very special event for all of us. Kate from Jellyvision will be attending our meeting this Friday and we will have an open discussion about the experience and insights gained. How were you inspired? What did you learn?
We will work in our Web Service and Swift teams to continue developing the Weather Wear Service and the Swift client app to send a request to the service and display results.
Some notes on what we have so far in our Swift Client:
We will meet at our usual time and place: 5:45 PM at 25N Coworking
@IBOutlet weak var cityLabel: UITextField!
@IBAction func GetWeather(_ sender: Any) { cityLabel.text = “Geneva” }
This week we will continue working in our smaller teams developing the Web Service and the iOS app.
Last week the team completed the tutorial Create a Web API with ASP.Net Core MVC and Visual Studio for Mac or the equivalent version for Windows Create a Web API with ASP.Net Core MVC and Visual Studio for Windows
The team successfully completed the parts of the tutorial that got a Web Service running locally and allowed users to exercise GET requests
This week, we can use that foundation to add a new controller to the project to handle the GET request for our custom Weather Wear service that will return a JSON Response. The team can talk through design approaches and algorithms to decide what exactly the service should do and what additional components are needed. For example:
Last week, the team successfully completed the Hello World tutorial in the first chapter of the book Coding iPhone Apps for Kids The link is to the book on Amazon where you can download the first Chapter as part of the free Sample. Following the tutorial, we were able to run the Hello World app on our iPhones/iPads attached via USB to the Macs running XCode. However, we did run into one problem with “provisioning” where an Apple ID used to sign the code was not getting successfully recognized as provisioned. Apple requires all Apps to be signed with a valid id in order to run on any attached device. It may just have been a slow lag time in having the credentials go through. We will take another look at it if still an issue. This is a forum that explains a bit about dealing with the issue: Forum discussion on iOS signing and provisioning issue
This week the team can work on developing the User Interface for the App using the Storyboard in XCode to add “views” to the screen. In XCode a View is an object on the screen (a more generic description would be a widget) . Some are controllers with which the user can interact (buttons, switches, text input boxes, etc.) and some are display only, such as labels. Design the view for the app, determining what is appropriate for input and display.
Tutorial: This Apple Tutorial explains in detail how to connect UI Elements to Code
Last week we decided on an overall purpose for our project. We will create a Web service and several different Clients to consume the service. Today, we will break into our teams to work on development of these components.
Web Service Team:
Swift IOS Team:
Other Teams?:
In Client/Server architecture, the Web Service is the Server and the Clients can be one or more applications(Web sites, mobile app, console app, etc.) that send an HTTP REQUEST to the Web Service and receive an HTTP RESPONSE back from the Web Server. The Web Service provides an API (Application Programming Interface to receive the REQUESTS from a Client. The Client software must know the specifications for formatting and submitting the REQUEST. The Client software must parse the RESPONSE from the API call to get the data into a format that the Client can use. Our Web Service will return the data in JSON (JavaScript Object Notation).
Check out this tutorial for more on JSON: W3C Schools JSON
Sample Code for various types of Clients calling the Weather Underground Service: Wunderground API Call Samples
Visual Studio C# Example of a Web API Client: Calling a Web API from a .NET Client
This evening’s meeting is at 25N Coworking at 5:45 pm. It is our last meeting of 2017. Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
AGENDA
Last week’s guest speaker, Grace Haaf, had so much great information to share that we decided to dedicate the meeting to listening to her career journey in the field of tech and having a great discussion on what the future holds for our girls, today’s challenges for women in tech, and how to make a positive impact on your community by utilizing the tech skills learned in college and beyond.
Now this week, we will be working with the Snake Game, Makey Makey kits, and Object-Oriented coding. Please see last week’s agenda below for details.
This evening we will meet back at our usual time and place: 25N Coworking at 5:45 PM.
Guest Speaker: Grace Haaf. Grace earned a PhD from Carnegie Mellon, has done extensive work in engineering and big data as well as owning her own company and recently participating in the Democratic primary process for the IL 6th Congressional District. We are looking forward to hearing her perspective on working in tech while being an active and engaged citizen in the political process.
Techie Table Talk: Following Grace’s presentation, we’ll hang out around our Conference Table where our FVGCC Members can share thoughts on what we just heard or discuss other ideas and interests related to tech fields, women in tech, educational opportunities, projects we may work on, upcoming events, etc.
Slither Onward with Game Development — It’s time for the Snake Game!
Class: a template representing some type; it has properties that hold values representing state and methods (aka functions) that invoke behaviors. Example: we can define a class Snake that has properties for size, body, skin, isAlive, and more. The properties may be given initial values within the class definition
But does JavaScript have real classes?: JavaScript didn’t have an actual “class” keyword and syntax until a 2015 specification which may not be implemented yet by all Browsers; see this MDN article on JavaScript classes
Constructor Function declaration conceptually implements a class: In the Snake program (written prior to the 2015 addition of “class” to JavaScript), the Snake variable defined by a constructor function is conceptually a class
Constructor: a function used to create a new instance of the class; it may have parameters which are values passed to the function and used to set some initial values for the object. The Snake constructor starts like:
var Snake = function(x, y, width, height, maxSize) {
Object: an instance of a class that can have its properties set and its methods invoked in code. For example, we create a Snake instance like this: var snake = new Snake(0, 0, canvas.width, canvas.height, 1000);
The girls of FVGCC had the privilege of web chatting with Jellyvision CEO, Amanda Lannert, as we wrapped up our first full year of coding club meetings. Ms. Lannert generously shared her path in tech as well as providing insight and advice to our high school students. Here is a sample of our conversation:
Ms. Lannert went to work for Leo Burnett right out of college. She discovered early in her career that any job and any industry can be interesting if the people you work with are curious and engaged. Who you work for and with is often more important than what you are doing in your daily work. When looking for employment, interview your boss just as they interview you. A good boss can turn your job into a fountain of learning that will lead to your next opportunity. A bad boss can make even the best career seem awful.
In every position you take, it is important to build your network. Who you know can often mean more than what you know as you move through your career. One such contact led Ms. Lannert to a tech startup, Jellyvision, that was producing CD-ROM games. At that time, Jellyvision produced the number one CD-ROM game, Who Wants to be a Millionaire?, based off of the popular TV show and the game, You Don’t Know Jack, a trivia-based party game series. In her first position at Jellyvision, Ms. Lannert was working with future head writers of The Colbert Report and creative types that inspired her every day. Interestingly, the company even turned down Seth Meyers for a job at that time! Joining Jellyvision, was important because of the people and the creative work, it wasn’t about the initial position she held, but what she learned from it. Within six months, Ms. Lannert was Jellyvision’s President.
With this new position, came the challenge of watching Jellyvision’s profit and loss numbers going off a cliff because the company’s main business was producing CD games and the technology around gaming was rapidly changing. As a result, at the age of 28, Ms. Lannert had the gut wrenching responsibility of shutting down the company, laying off 60 people, including herself. They had three opportunities to keep the company, but then the tech bubble burst and the company had to close. One of the greatest takeaways for Ms. Lannert from this experience was that, “Failure is not permanent. You need perspective and resilience.”
Ms. Lannert’s next opportunity would find her again working with Jellyvision after the company’s founder raised money to restart the company, transitioning from the gaming industry to selling software that talks people through difficult life decisions such as health benefits, insurance, and investments/saving. The change did not come with overnight success, the company spent a decade going sideways, but through grit and perseverance, Jellyvision now works with just under 1,000 companies, representing 91 billion dollars in insurance premium. Companies spend significant amounts of money each year to help explain health insurance to their employees. Jellyvision helps make this process clearer, more engaging, and as an added benefit, easy, and fun!
Ms. Lannert used the latter part of our conversation to take questions and share important thoughts on college and career:
Thanks Ms. Lannert for your time and insight!
Fox Valley Girls Coding Club 