Onward

As mentioned last week, I've moved past the small Rock Paper Scissors project for the moment with plans to return to it intermittently to spruce up things here and there.

As of right now, I'm still following the CodeCademy exercise guide. I'm working now on a simple address book with functions to print the entire list of contacts (two fields, first and last name, with a few other details entered but not retrieved) as well as a 'search' function, currently usable by editing a portion of the code to perform said search.

I have some mid term plans to rewrite a simple address book within Aptana. Features I intend to include are adding and removing contacts, field validation, removal of contacts and last name search.

Long term project ideas include an adaptive full data search function similar to what you'd see on many mobile devices nowdays (Hit F, we're taking you to the contacts with the last name starting with F, hit A, we're narrowing that down to Fa, etc.), contact editing and display of specific contact detail fields via checkboxes, all wrapped up in a readable and hopefully modern UI (if my idea of 'modern' isn't dated by the time I get to this).

When I am ready to start this project in Aptana, I'm looking do this from the ground up, utilizing the methods described in my 'Lets break things down a little' post.

In the even longer term, I'd like to take this outside of a local website and push / pull the data from a server via jQuery and PHP or SQL.

We'll see how it goes...

Outside of this, I'm keeping a close eye on a few reddit resources I've found a while back, /r/learnprogramming and /r/cscareerquestions focusing for now mostly on the latter as it seems to be more active and has given me insight into long term possibilities.

I find both of these subreddits great in that they get me thinking well beyond what I would be picking up on my own by simply following a track and reading materials, and perhaps even attending some college courses on the subject. This is due to the 'real world' (albeit anecdotal) experiences of many others in the industry with various skillsets, goals, education, employment history, and career paths. I'm at this point not expecting to get a lot of direct coding knowledge but rather broad ideas to keep in mind, reminders via reposts or the same questions cropping up time and time again, and a sneak peak into recruiting and the portfolio / work experience required to get a foot in the door at X company. They've also been great tools in pointing me in other directions for further reading and practice. I'd say thus far it seems pretty invaluable.