Monito Monita!
Too busy to do Monito Monita with your friends? There’s an app for that!
Flask, Backbone and Heroku
http://furious-leaf-5120.herokuapp.com/
Practice makes perfect. I should do more exercises like this.
Source code here: https://github.com/marksteve/bookmarks
Wasted Years
No. I wasn’t “wasted” for years. I “wasted” my years. My college years to be specific.
Back in 2004, I wrote down Computer Science (CS) and Computer Engineering (CoE) as my preferred programs in my UPCAT application. When I passed the exams, I was informed that I was only wait-listed for CS and had a DPWAS (Degree Program w/ Available Slots) status for CoE. So I was told to choose another engineering course with available slots. I ended up taking Civil Engineering. My goal was to shift to CS during the first school year. But I met friends, joined an organization and forgot about shifting. I became complacent and thought I should just continue with CE since it doesn’t seem that bad after all.
Fast-forward to the present. I am now both a licensed civil engineer and a web engineer for a local startup. But I don’t practice CE at all. As in at ALL. And I love it. I mean I’m doing what I’ve always wanted. I’m still a builder but instead of steel structures or concrete buildings, I build web applications.
It was all good until I realized that I’ve missed a lot during those 5 years of studying something that I wouldn’t be using. I’ve freelanced for web projects during my college years. I guess I can say I didn’t miss out in the “money-making” aspect of learning to program. But what if I did shift to CS/CoE? What would have happened?
I began thinking about this because of a resume sent to us that I just read. A fresh IT graduate from UST. I checked out one of his projects and at the footer it shows his name and another guy’s name. He had a friend help him out while making it. When he was studying, he had classmates he could talk about programming with. I didn’t have that chance. Especially now that we’re all working. When we get together, they’ll have stories about project management, “which foundation solution is suitable for this situation”, contractor names I heard only for the first time in my life and other topics I would’ve slightly appreciated before when I was studying.
Also, there’s the possibility of being in a better place if I did shift to a computer related course. I’m beyond happy with where I working right now. But I bet I’d be of more help to our company right now if I took those CS classes.
Anyways. What’s done is done. I just have to move forward. I just have to make up for the loss of those wasted years. :)
23
I have a handful of drafts recounting some of my previous adventures this year meant to be posted here in my blog. But most of these are just a paragraph long. Hopefully I’ll finish writing them this month. I’ve included blogging as one of my birthday resolutions. Yup. I just turned 23 yesterday. My other birthday resolutions include regular exercising, improving my programming knowledge and meeting new people.
Since I graduated I’ve been feeling stuck. I’ve been constantly depressed. Always thinking. But I shouldn’t be. I’ve got it going good. Almost too good. But I just feel so hollow… Empty. I guess I’m just probably being too pessimistic. Overthinking. I just need people to talk to. And since my friends have started building up their own lives and careers, I should try meeting new people close to my line of work (I’m a CE graduate but works as a web engineer for a startup). I don’t mean that I’m losing my current friends. We still meet occasionally of course but you know what I mean.
Another way I’ve thought of to decrease the burden of my deteriorating social life is by blogging. We talk to our friends to express ourselves. And aside from coding, I haven’t been doing any other self expression lately. That’s why I decided to include blogging in my resolutions.
I’m old enough to feel nostalgic about my life. I’ve experienced enough events that could add up to a movie. But I want more. I don’t want my life to be just “a movie”. I want it to be a blockbuster. A blockbuster scored 10 in Rotten Tomatoes. So with the start of my 23rd year in this world, I’ll try to improve myself in every way possible. One resolution at a time.
Autocomplete in Backbone.js
Backbone.js has been a joy to develop with. No more confusing trees of callbacks. No more binding of data to DOM elements. All MVC love.
Now say you’re using jQuery UI’s autocomplete widget and you want to use a Backbone “choices” collection as your source. Selected autocomplete items should be added to a “selected” collection too so you could bind it to a view.
Notice that I remove models from the “choices” collection when allowDupes is false. I figured it’s a more natural way of doing it rather than checking if the model already exists in the “selected” collection. So you would also have to add back to “choices” when you remove from “selected”.
