First off – I got into launch academy! I got the email today after almost 2 weeks of stressing about if/when I would hear. I’m really happy to say that I made it in, and I’ll be part of the 24th cohort. Now no rest for the wicked: I have (a lot of) things to learn!

3.5h Tonight was a lot of small questions and searches. I looked at the launch academy syllabus and put everything that I haven’t learned or heard of on a list. I’m not looking to learn everything beforehand, but I do want to have a good understanding of what the tech does and why we use it. There were big things that I knew a bit about like rails and other completely unknown things like rspec, yarn, and active record. I’m going to put in some time getting more info about all of them and then I’ll have a bit more background when we finally get there in class.

I also kept going on my js notes. I’m not sure if I should look at this as a project that will have an end or just part of studying. I also have been thinking about making up some flash cards. A flash card-type  iphone app could be best (and I looked into it) but I may go old school (note cards) just for the feel of it.

I also finally looked up how to install postgreSQL on osx. I found a great walkthrough and got it up and running. Next I found one tutorial on how to interface js with postgres. Finally I realized that the general consensus seems to be that one connects to postgres with node, not javascript. Javascript seems to be a possible but entirely too sketchy idea for almost anyone. Hmmm. It’s still good to learn, and it’s on my bootcamp prep list, but the reason I was tackling it tonight is because I need to find a way to dynamically serve some twitter stats. Those are currently written to a text file by python, and I look forward to doing that in node or ruby in the future. If node can read both the text file and the db, then I don’t really need to learn postgres quite yet. I guess I just need to figure out how to do AJAX, or something (i think) similar to it. I looked into MVC and I’m starting to pull at the strings of the MVC puzzle in order to figure out how everything interrelates and what tech it runs on. Is each phase of M/V/C it’s own tech? Meaning one might be ruby, one might be javascript, etc. It seems like rails is referred to as a mvc framework, so I clearly need more info. I’m especially interested in finding a minimal version of a mvc setup that I can play with. This requires more googling.