DEV Community: Christopher Hsu

Hack Reactor Week 3 Recap

Christopher Hsu — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 03:25:46 +0000

This week is React week! We started the week off with an introduction to React and learned how to build a mini app that searches for video using YouTube API and updates the video player as the user changes the search input. This was a very interesting project but also a leap from previous concepts since we have not had experience with React up until now. I had to consult Help Desk multiple times and I really appreciate the help that the staff provided to guide me through the sprint. The next sprint we had was converting our React app to a React-Redux app. It was not a very tough sprint, however, it seemed like Redux created more work and was more complicated to configure. Redux and React have different structures with how they want to handle the application state and there are both pros and cons to each of the frameworks. We wrapped the week up with learning about Node. Although conceptually it was not hard sprint, it was challenging to start off with the lack of familiarity with Node documentation and syntax. We created a server for our chatterbox client that we created last week for our AJAX, jQuery sprint. It was very fulfilling able to see how the frontend ties in with the server to provide an interactive application that one might use on a daily basis.

Hack Reactor Week 2 Recap

Christopher Hsu — Mon, 23 Aug 2021 02:50:04 +0000

We kicked off the week by learning about inheritance pattern and how to use it in both pseudoclassical style as well as ES6 style. We had a fun sprint called subclass dance party where we created different subclasses of dancers who perform different actions on the dance floor using HTML, jQuery, and CSS. We then started our sprint on algorithms. This was an interesting sprint where we learn more about visualizing a problem and breaking it down into smaller parts to construct an algorithm that we could implement as code. This complemented the interview challenges/toy problems that we have just started this week and helped me to be able to solve these problems more effectively. We wrapped up the week with a sprint on jQuery and AJAX where we constructed a frontend chat client that would retrieve and send messages to a server and display it in the browser. This is the toughest sprint so far because we have to understand the data structures that we want to store the data on our frontend framework and also the interactions between the client and the user. We learned about the MVC model and how to develop a clear UI.

Hack Reactor Week 1 Recap

Christopher Hsu — Wed, 11 Aug 2021 14:57:06 +0000

Last Saturday marks the last day of my first week at HR. It was a pleasant first week. We spent the first two days reviewing key concepts covered at pre-course by rewriting some recursion problems as well as underscore methods. We then started our four day sprint on class patterns and data structures. At the end of day 2, we had a self-assessment(SA) on the review material. The SA wasn't a very hard problem but was challenging to finish and pass all the tests within the one hour period allotted to us. If we could not pass the tests we can try to finish the SA within the next day. On day 3 of the week, I learned about five different class styles including functional, functional-shared, prototypal, pseudoclassical, and ES6. The sprint was relatively straightforward; we had to implement data structures such as stack and queue and write both of them in all 5 class patterns. On day 5, we started a sprint on writing different data structures such as linked lists, trees, hash tables, sets, graphs, and binary search trees. This was a tougher sprint than the previous two because we had to understand each data structure and implement the key methods to them. The week ended with a self-assessment where we have to implement another method to the tree. This SA was more challenging to me because I was unsure as to how I should approach the problem. In the end even though I solved the problem, I overcomplicated it an implement an algorithm that took double the time than the most efficient solution. All in all, week one was a great experience. I really liked the format of HR where we spend a lot of time pair programming and discovering the content for ourselves. Being a fresh graduate from college, it was definitely a transition to get used to. I enjoy being able to bounce ideas off of my partners and learn alongside people who have the same goal of being a software engineer.