Viewed by many as the founding figure of Western philosophy, Socrates (469-399 B.C.) is at once the most exemplary and the strangest of the Greek philosophers. He grew up during the golden age of Pericles’ Athens, served with distinction as a soldier, but became best known as a questioner of everything and everyone. His style of teaching—immortalized as the Socratic method—involved not conveying knowledge, but rather asking question after clarifying question until his students arrived at their own understanding. He wrote nothing himself, so all that is known about him is filtered through the writings of a few contemporaries and followers, most notably his student Plato. Socrates was accused of corrupting the youth of Athens and sentenced to death. Choosing not to flee, he spent his final days in the company of his friends before drinking the executioner’s cup of poisonous hemlock.
Pythagoras is often referred to as the first pure mathematician. He was born on the island of Samos, Greece in 569 BC. Various writings place his death between 500 BC and 475 BC in Metapontum, Lucania, Italy. His father, Mnesarchus, was a gem merchant. His mother’s name was Pythais. Pythagoras had two or three brothers.
I am starting a series of short blog entries on philosophy, which happens to be my other favourite subject in addition to computer science. I really need to submit quite a few blog entries so that I can finish my community bootcamp program. I am in the process of finalizing my last programming project, but I will not be allowed to “graduate” unless I do my blog posts. Wow! Way to go Flatiron, blog posts! I am definatelly off at the end of this month… Anyway on to philosophy, which is actually very closely related to computer science and programming.
The application that I created for this specific assignment is called MovieDB-jQuery. It is a rails based MVC web app for users to list and review movies. Rails facilitates the back-end API of the application while javascript (specifically jQuery) via AJAX calls to the API, is used to create specific parts of the user experience. The basis for this app is my previous assignment, but this time the ‘show movie’ and ‘index reviews for a movie’ pages (they are both the same page) have been implemented using AJAX requests, JSON responses, Javascript Objects, prototype functions on these objects and dynamic manipulation of the DOM via jQuery. Some extra functionality has been included on this page in order for a user to be able to submit a new review for a selected movie. Again the review form is submitted via AJAX and the new review appears on the page dynamically without any full page reloads apart from the initial one.
Welcome to another completely useless blog post that I need to do in order to progress with the learn.co material. In my previous blog post I complained about how nowadays is considered necessary to blog about any software project you may undertake. Again do not get me wrong, I understand that online schools need a way to keep you engaged with the activity so that you don’t drop out. This is also a very good way of letting off some steam after the daily frustrations of learning a new skill, especially if you are undergoing an immersive style course. Moreover, there is also the hope that you will make a good impression on your future potential employers, when they search for you online and find out how extremely interested you are in programming, since you are willing to sacrifice more of your personal time, not only to put those final touches on your project but also to blog and tell the world about it and your experiences throughout.