Broken Free - Heroku Link

Broken Free is an application which combines three data sources: the Economic Freedom Index, the Corruption Perception Index, and WorldBank development indicators. They have overlapping years in their coverage, from 2013-2016. The goal was to have a project that will be useful and interesting for members of the international policy community and will be a subject of conversation when engaging with these professionals.

One of the more significant challenges of this project was the data cleaning. Not that it was difficult to do in Excel (it was rather easy) but that it proved impossible to do with Ruby / Rails. I should have given up sooner and switched to the better tool. I understand that this was a distraction from the emphasis on technical skills learning and I was very frustrated that it was an issue.

However, I was very pleased in the end how the data flows from the country code outward. It is an index for the rest of the data, allowing querying and the merging of the data into one table in the view. I’m happy that this organization helps the user navigate through the data in such an intuitive way.

It still needs work - the Google OAuth is broken and really only fulfilled the Turing project requirements

Pog Hogs

The Turing project requirement was to build from user stories a web site that functions as an online store. We chose to build the best pog website on the internet, for the world’s pog aficionados.

It includes authentication and authorization for administrators and users. The administrators can view a dashboard for the orders and items for the website. Users are able to place items into a cart, checkout, and place their order.

My primary piece of functionality was the shopping cart, where I struggled for a long time to get the functionality to work properly. I learned a great deal about how to manage state inside of sessions and to use POROs with SimpleDelegator to push the logic down to the views.

Date Night - Binary Tree

The project requirement is to build a binary search tree to store and interact with data. I really enjoyed this project because it was an opportunity to dive deeply into how to use recursion in object-oriented programming, something I’d only done in Scheme before. I learned how to imagine myself inside an object when writing procedures and to see program design in terms of passing messages between objects. This was a significant point of growth for me.

CompleteMe

For this Turing project we were required in a pair to build an autocomplete feature using a data structure called a trie. The final deliverable needed to be able to load millions of data points from the dictionary included in our Mac OS.

Headcount

For this Turing project the objective is to build a relational database with query and analysis functionality for a large set of Colorado educational data.

I was grateful for the opportunity to build this functionality from scratch in Ruby. While I’ve done data analysis in Excel and SQL, it was a great experience to be faced with the challenges of managing a large set of data files from a purely programming perspective. I particularly enjoyed the organizational challenge and intellectual abstraction of building data access, relationships, and analysis layers in an object oriented style.

The lessons I learned here were a great foundation for working with databases in web applications. This is powerful knowledge.