At the end of the previous post, I had started working as a web developer. I got more and more comfortable in PHP, MySQL, and JavaScript, and got used to the idea of having a salary, insurance, and a 401(k). In the 3rd to 5th years of my development career I probably learned as much about working on a team/for a company as I did about coding..

Project: Classroom Grades Correlation Chart

My first job on a larger team was at a company that did web applications targeted to educational institutions, on a MySQL / PHP / Sencha ExtJS 4 stack. ExtJS 4 had a robust chart library, and I did a lot of work on data vizualizations of education data.

One of the more complex charts I worked on during this period was a chart that trued to display the relationship between classroom grades and standardized test scores.

The chart I built for this was a heavily modified scatter plot. Classroom letter grades are plotted on the X axis, standardized test scores are plotted on the Y axis, the colors indicate “achievement level”, and the width of the marker shows how many students got that combination of letter grade and test score. I wrote this up in more detail for the company’s blog at the time, and that can still be found here.

Project: ExamN Offline

Another big project I did in 2014 was making my employer’s online assessment platform work offline. At the time it was the biggest stretch I’d ever taken in development. I was always a full stack developer, but before this project I spent most of my time in the server-side part of the stack. ExamN Offline was my first foray into single-page web apps driven by as-needed API calls. I was also learning HTML5’s Application Cache, async calls with Promises, and client-side storage with IndexedDB for the first time as well. (I put together a presentation about learning those things for a talk at a local coders group, if you’re curious what 2014-me thought about Promises.)

PS: You remember all the memes in 2020 about online test taking software that exposed the answers to you if you knew how to open the developer tools? Every time I see something like that my eyes about roll out of my head. I thought of (and shut down) all those tricks back in 2014! Because we needed to be able to download the test ahead of time, we had questions that were encrypted until you got the password at the beginning of the test, and never transmitted the answers at all. It wasn’t that hard to built it correctly–I don’t understand why so many companies chose not to.