(A backlogged entry I wrote back in March but kept overlooking to post.)

One of the difficulties of picking up a project is figuring out the tangled logic of how it all got put together. Especially when it was done by another consultant a few years ago (and subsequently hasn’t been touched–until now) and was only briefly reviewed by FTEs of the team (also a few years ago). Of course, the task of making changes to it falls on me. Good thing I’ve had experience muddling through already-written code.

I’ve been learning new things again (unfortunately my MongoDB efforts have been put aside yet again). One of the cool new things that I’ve heard of in passing, but never got curious about was Selenium, a tool that automates actions in the browser. I have had a lot of fun playing around with both the IDE and WebDriver. Unfortunately, I hit some snags when my lead requested I try out Selenium with SpecFlow, a behavior testing framework.

After working on the previous tutorial, I decided to get acquainted with the C# driver to perform basic MongoDB queries as the approaches can be quite different between shell and driver. I figured it would be a fairly quick exercise, but I spent an afternoon and then some trying to figure out how to send a BsonDocument as a return type to a Web API method.

Note that I’m not very well-versed with Web API and in retrospect, it’s probably a fairly simple solution, but for all my Google-fu, I couldn’t find the most straightforward answer to my problem. The first being, Web API doesn’t know how to parse a BsonDocument. The second being, passing a raw string as a return type results in JSON parse errors.

I’ve gone back and forth with learning MongoDB, then losing interest, then learning MongoDB again, then losing interest. It’s a cycle that keeps occuring if there isn’t a meaningful application that gets built with the new technology. I’m crossing my fingers that this time something will get built. But, baby steps first: tutorials.

While studying traversal algorithms, I was stumped by writing the iterative versions of in-order and post-order traversals. This is my attempts at organizing my thoughts on why it is deceptively simple and how I might be able to change my thinking to approach similar problems.

After playing copious amounts of Animal Crossing (AC), I saw tidbits of Fantasy Life (FL) on the Tumblrs I would visit every so often. Intrigued, I watched the trailer and left with the impression of “eh, maybe.” Then, in November, a friend asked if I had the game because she really enjoyed it. I told her I would see if there were any deals for the holidays. There weren’t, but I ended up snagging a couple of copies – one for me and one for my sister (her Xmas present). Needless to say, it is now our Currently Playing game.

Given that playing video games is frowned upon at work, dedicated consoles like the Nintendo 3DS are reasonably taboo. However, smartphones are OK. It’s not too surprising that there’s a mobile/tablet games trend when viewed from this angle. While I have been actively playing Animal Crossing: New Leaf since the end of June (at home), I have more recently picked up Spellfall and Gridland for my iPhone. These two match-3 games have different mechanics and different intentions.

This post is the continuation of my proof-of-concept project with AngularJS, Web API, and FOrms Authentication. The previous post covered the back end (database/entity model and Web API). This post will cover the front end (AngularJS).

I started writing this post a week ago, intending to clean it up and post it sometime this week, but then I got busy. And when I get busy, I get tired and unmotivated/lack the energy to do other things. For some reason, Fridays feel like a pick-me-up. So here I am, cleaning up my original post and separating it out into two posts because the content is heavier than I originally thought.

I was given a small proof-of-concept project to work on involving two new pieces of technology (to me and the software lead): Web API and AngularJS. I have covered AngularJS before. I have had some experience with the MVC Framework when it was back in version 1 and I have muddled my way through more recent versions’ tutorials, so Web API wasn’t a completely new framework to me. Combining the two together, however, is completely new.

One of the specifications of using Web API from the lead, and the point of the proof-of-concept, was if I could secure the Web API from being called anonymously. An initial search resulted in Microsoft’s official articles on using the different forms of authentication with Web API, but they were mostly at a theoretical level and not many practical examples. Further research and asking a knowledgable friend resulted in volumes of articles of practical examples of widely different methods (basic, Forms Authentication, Windows Authentication, oAuth, token, etc.). Too much, actually.

In short, yes, it is possible to require authentication prior to getting any meaningful result from a Web API call. My proof-of-concept went the Forms Authentication route, which my friend said broke the concept of REST (i.e., Web API) because now we’re dealing with state – is the user logged in or not? I went ahead anyway because it was an exercise if nothing else. Turns out the existing application (which would be ideally rewritten using newer technologies like AngularJS, hence the proof-of-concept) also used Forms Authentication so, bonus point. It also revealed to me how lacking my knowledge of authentication methods and even my basic grasp on AngularJS was.

There’s something about the user experience (UX) field that fascinates me yet repulses me at the same time. It seems to be the hipster iteration (evolution? version? generation?) of traditional human-computer interaction (HCI) with the millenial’s “privileged” mindset. Privileged in the sense that the company can (a privilege) and will force design changes onto their users, often to the users’ dismay.

In the latest reading of article comments and pointers to interviews from older HCI designers (not UX designers as they seem more temperate and logical about their decisions), I have been rethinking my original thoughts on UX as being in its adolescent phase.