Workshop Grunt work and a Sassy Project

Big thanks to Lilly today who helped everyone in the group set up both Grunt, Ruby, RubyGems, and SASS for us to use on the project. We had already been using GitHub for version control and had decided that we wanted to use Bootstrap. With the latest Bootstrap 4 using SASS we thought it would be a good opportunity to jump in.

First Foray into the Command Prompt World

I had heard a lot about SASS and the idea of having a compiled CSS where you could use variables and other added functionality sounded like a really neat idea. So I am glad that we are going to be using it on this project as I feel the experience will be invaluable (even if it all ends horrible). This project has involved a lot of jumping into the deep end but fingers crossed with a team of four we will be able to bring together a fully functional prototype for the demonstration next week.

From the feedback on our project thus far there have been a lot of great suggestions for further functionality which we could add to our concept. I feel that if we can achieve all our core functionalities by next weeks demonstration we will really be able to branch out and explore some fun aspects that we could add to improve user experience.

But back to the real world, where in another stroke of success I manged to complete the Trove API call. Credit in no small part to our Tutor and Leila (who was also having the same problem) who helped me cobble together a working request for an image.

Trove API Call

Image from Trove

All in all despite today's minor successes there is still a lot more work left to be done. It may be a long weekend ahead. But hopefully more content for the blog and more frustrations, venting and hopefully reflection from me too.