Today was the last full day working on our penny auctions apps. We’d written the code for the required features over the last couple of weeks so it was mostly styling our app and spotting silly little errors – ever accidentally delete your script link to pusher.min.js? It’s kinda important if you want to get Pusher (which a third party service for handling websockets) working! With regards to styling, I think I got a bit fussy/particular at one point. I’ll deny it later but I think I asked my partner to make the background of our index page lighter when it was white! Good times.
The day was broken up a bit with a session on accessing a user’s previously used credit card details for payment made through Stripe (i.e. buying bids and paying for a won item). No one wants the headache of storing credit card details since there are strict regulations around that, PCI compliance etc. That’s where payment processors like PayPal and Stripe come in. With Stripe, when a user makes their first purchase through your site, a customer id is generated. This is used by Stripe to manage a user’s details. It also provides developers with a way to access a previous purchaser’s credit card details without having to store them. All it takes is some logic to store and associate a customer’s Stripe ID with the relevant user record in your database. Add a bit of conditional logic so that the Stripe JavaScript popup asking for a user’s card details isn’t triggered if they already have a customer ID associated, and you’re golden.
We (i.e. my current project partner and I) also spent an hour or so talkingn through final project ideas and we got lots of really useful feedback from our instructor, Alex, with regards to the technical and design feasibility of our idea.
Tonorrow, we’ve got a one off iOS workshop where we’ll use our news apps that we wrote when we first started Rails to interface with an iOS app which we’ll build. At least, I think that’s the plan. The number of final project ideas I’ve come up with which had a mobile component is probably something like 99% so tomorrow is hopefully the start of my journey to exploring mobile development (or is it development for mobiles?).
Last thing, it turns out I’ve been pretty confused about the fundamentals of CSS.
Gem of the day: Width had to do with the area occupied by the element’s content. It doesn’t include padding. Padding comes after and both width and padding are enclosed by the element’s border.
I Learn to Code 