Week 8

Midterm presentations

We’ll be spending our class today going through your Harmonic Collection projects.

A reminder on format: each student will have about 5 minutes to present their work. In this time, talk us through your topic and explain how you wanted to explore it through your entries. Then show us your pages (on mobile and desktop), taking us through each one—but stay focused on the whole. You can also explain what your challenges were, and how you’d improve on the execution with additional time or more experience. Each presentation will be followed by a few minutes of feedback and critique from your classmates and from me.

And per our community agreement (and courtesy), the presenting student “has the floor.” Everyone else should close their laptops and turn off their phones—and nobody should come-and-go from the room during a presentation. (Disruptions will count against the offender.)

Here’s the order we’ll be going through:

1. Destiny
2. James
3. Kuhu
4. Samarth
5. Thiha
6. Anushka
7. Dani
8. Chris

9. Jayna

   We’ll take our break here, halfway-ish through.

10. Dev
11. Aparna
12. Alice
13. Amanda
14. Erika
15. Vanessa
16. Adrian
17. Donovan

Phew! That’s everyone.

For next week

• We’ll pick up again with a reading:

  A Software Design Manifesto
  Mitchell Kapor, 1996

  Again, add your responses to this doc—which we will discuss next class:

  A Software Design Manifesto responses

• Complete the next (sixth) entry for your Harmonic Collection.

  Take this as an opportunity to again think about your project as a system. You will ultimately have 11 entries—and you don’t want to be grasping for things at the end of the semester. You could treat the midterm as a chapter-marker, or continue with your current progression.

  When you’re done, add a link to your sixth entry:

  Harmonic Collection entries

• I know all this manual/repetitive/copy-paste HTML writing is a pain! So we’re going to try using Jekyll, which is CMS (content management system) software that we’ll use for templating. We’ll go into more depth next week, but I want you to start by having it installed on your machines so we can hit the ground running:

  • Jekyll on Mac OS
    Instructions for Macs.

  • Jekyll on Windows
    And our Windows friends.

  • Install Jekll on Apple Silicon
    A pretty thorough video of a guy setting it up and getting a basic site going.

  
  This is going to be technical, probably somewhat tedious, and involve a CLI (command-line interface)! It often goes wrong for some arcane reason. But it’ll make your (HTML) lives much easier, I promise. Google, help each other, talk to the Code Tutors, and work your way through it.

  For next week, when you type jekyll -v into your terminal you should see jekyll 4.3! Have it installed and building an empty site by next class.

Session recording

Session recording