Ask HN: What do you think about my first coding project?

14 points by kmack 13 years ago | 12 comments

I've been teaching myself to code over the last couple of months and finally, this past weekend, decided to put my mind to actually trying to build something! So this is my first little project, Clearli a quick and simple weather app.

Please let me know what you think!

http://clearli.herokuapp.com/

logn 13 years ago |

Looks nice and good that you can now build a full app. Two things, you have a bug as it's 73 degrees F where I am and the site says 0. Also, keep in mind that a large part of coding is the quality of the source itself. To that end, there are many books on the subject such as Clean Code.

kmack 13 years ago | |

I'll be sure to go back through and clean up my code, the site should however be displaying 0 if yesterday at this same time it was also, 73 degrees F, does this seem correct?

logn 13 years ago | | |

no, definitely a bug

joonix 13 years ago |

I actually really like this. The natural language of the weather and the comparison to yesterday is helpful in understanding how I need to approach the day. This is impressive for a first project after only a few months! Mind sharing your recommended resources for learning?

kmack 13 years ago | |

Of course, up until now my experience has been something along the lines of... first I completed Chris Pines learn to program and all of the exercises on Codeacademy. Next, I read the book, Beginning Ruby from Novice to Professional and completed some other online exercises such as the Ruby Monk problems. Most of the preparation I was doing at the time was to get ready for my interview to App Academy so, I also completed their prepwork which consisted of some TDD problems and an event planner from Jumpstart Labs.

Unfortunately I didn't do so great in the interview for App Academy and was rejected, which was last week, however following my interview I decided I would just set my mind to actually trying to build something to begin the process of teaching myself!

Hope this helps

kmack 13 years ago | | |

Here's a link to that prepwork if you're interested

https://github.com/appacademy/prep-work

powatom 13 years ago |

Seems pretty nice, but the background is repeating vertically here. It'd be good to be able to set my location manually too, it thinks I'm in London but I'm up North in Liverpool.

kmack 13 years ago | |

I'll check into that background issue, I think the locations are off for some people because it's just checking their IP? I was hoping to include the option for people the just manually search locations in the next iteration. Thanks for the feedback though!

dan-g 13 years ago |

I enjoy how it's really clean. Have you thought about using bullet points instead of full sentences? It may be easier to get all of the information in one glance.

ColinWright 13 years ago |

Clickable: http://clearli.herokuapp.com/

jcutrell 13 years ago |

Nice job.

Try doing this to make the background prettier (albeit a bit more demanding on performance):

background-size: cover;