Coding

As I was finishing my first website (this one you’re on), I overheard my friend’s dad speaking to him about needing a website to be done in time for the opening of their new restaurant: Red Rooster House. Spurred by how enjoyable designing my own website was, I decided to take a crack at designing a website for a business. I knew this would entail different aspects to the design than I possessed on my personal website; modern restaurant websites have a certain feel and look to them. They’re clean and elegant while maintaining a straightforward composure needed to convey their message and menu to their customers. I started the design process by sitting down with the owner of the restaurant and determining what he’d like on the site. Once I gathered the required info, I got to work scoping out some of the best modern websites for restaurants out there. They followed a theme, and I was able to implement this quite well on the home page. Photography was incredibly important. I designed the entire website using filler images which can be seen through the commit logs on my GitHub. Once I got the general layout set, I told the restaurant owner that I’d need to come in and take a series of pictures to use for the website. He was very accommodating to my requests and the process was undergone within one night. I edited the pictures and substituted them for the filler ones on the site. I then designed the logo that you can see on the navigation bar from scratch, using Adobe Illustrator; this logo is soon to be used on business cards and menus for the restaurant. Everything had started to come to my vision and the last thing I needed was a personal touch from the family that owned the restaurant itself. I had them write any areas that would include paragraphs or personal statements, like the about section. The final touches were improving ARIA accessibility, as well as the most painstaking part: realizing that PDF files don’t render every page for mobile device browsers, meaning I’d have to convert the PDF to HTML. This was not as easy as it seems, as a lot of formatting was lost in the conversion. All in all, the site was a success. The family that owned the restaurant was elated with the result and I was able to help my community in a small way. The site can be found at redroosterhouservc.com.

While taking Calculus III last year, my professor, Frank Servas, did an incredible job explaining the purpose and beauty of polar coordinates. I immediately wanted to attempt writing a program that would accept any polar equation and draw the graph in real time. I settled on using a reliable Python library I’d grown accustom to enjoying: Turtle. “Turtle graphics is a popular way for introducing programming to kids. It was part of the original Logo programming language developed by Wally Feurzeig, Seymour Papert and Cynthia Solomon in 1967” [1]. I had taught plenty of my tutees using Turtle and it seemed a great option. The first part of the project was situating a layout for the graph and how to display the drawings. I settled on allowing the user to see the axes being drawn to further the understanding. Once the axes were drawn, I had to decide how to render in the drawing of the graph. I worked out the polar graphing equation and from there used the math library to determine the location the turtle would head to based on taking the cos(radians) for the x position and the sin(radians) for the y position. The radians were given by iterating from 1 to 360 (all degrees of a circle) and converting each degree. Once I was able to successfully get the turtle to draw a Cardioid, I switched focus on allowing for any function to be drawn. This step was easy in theory, I had already used variables for all the graphing function’s parameters, all I had to do was enter in different data! But I wasn’t satisfied with having the user have to enter each part of the equation (the additive, the constant, the trigonometric function, and the multiple of theta) separately. The solution I settled on was to use regular expressions to parse the user’s string and route the data accordingly. This was accomplished and allows for optionality of certain parts of the equation (e.g. an additive). Overall, I’m pleased with the result and the code can be found on my GitHub (link above), but dissatisfied that Professor Servas and his students would have to run the program through a Python interpreter to see the result. I will soon be adapting the code to be served on a GitHub web page for all students and educators to use freely! Note: This program’s development was aided by Chris Webb’s article, Polar Plots in Python: https://medium.com/explorations-in-python/polar-plots-in-python-cad59d96197a Sources: [1] - https://docs.python.org/3/library/turtle.html