DEV Community: Fearne York

My Dev Journey: Week 15

Fearne York — Sun, 15 Aug 2021 16:07:23 +0000

It's crazy to think that my Northcoders course ended a week ago, this blog was a cathartic way for me to think retrospectively each week, about the tasks and experiences that each week of the course holds. If you want to find out about the final project me and my team worked on, you can check out the recording of our graduation!

If you've enjoyed this blog post or the whole series, maybe consider checking out my GitHub 😁

What's happened this week

Time off

As a well deserved break (in my opinion 😅) I haven't wrote a line of code in a week, and I feel so much more recharged and refreshed. 14 weeks is a long time to work without a break, even in a 'real' work environment, and anyone will feel burnt out and tired after a marathon like that! So I spent the weekend after I finished with my partner and went to visit family for a birthday. It was really nice to visit family especially after not seeing anyone for a long time COVID-wise. I also got a car this week, I passed my driving test a few weeks ago whilst on the course and haven't had the chance to arrange anything to do with it!

Getting ready to start my first dev job!

This week I signed all of the paperwork for my first developer job! I'm very excited to start and from the team that I've had the pleasure of speaking to so far, they all like their roles and all seem lovely. I'll talk a bit more on the interview process in the next section.

I'll be starting as a Junior Developer, and I can't wait to learn more about how to be a developer in the workplace and get stuck in with my new team! The bootcamp was remote, aside from a few days here and there, so it's kind of exciting to be going into my new office and seeing what everything is like.

Advice

Bootcamps

If you've been reading any of my blog and have been considering a coding bootcamp then I can wholeheartedly say absolutely go for it! I can obviously only attest to the quality of the Northcoders bootcamp, with that being the only one I've been on.

However, the quality of the tutoring from the classroom team is unparalleled in my opinion and the passion that they put in everyday is very apparent, and very very appreciated by the students.

If you have any doubts about bootcamps or Northcoders in general when you're thinking of applying, then just reaching out and asking all of your questions is a great idea.

The main thing I'll say is that it is far more affordable than it may seem at first. I chose the deferred payment option to spread the cost of the course out over two years with no interest applied to that loan.

Interviews and tech tests

I think there's a lot of worry around interviews and especially tech tests so I'd thought I'd share my experience, the good and the bad!

The bad

I'd applied for a grad role at a different place in Leeds a few weeks ago, the process was very impersonal, all email communication and online forms, and their tech test was the embodiment of everything I'd worried about. It was a list of super difficult abstract questions under a strict time limit that didn't really allow me to showcase any of my skills. The whole process left me feeling really dejected because it was very unfriendly and me not passing made me question whether I'd be able to get a job.

Luckily they're not all like this in my experience and from doing it I've learnt that my performance on these kind of arbitrary test doesn't define what I know. If anything, having experienced this I know that this kind of interview process would be a red flag for me when job hunting in the future!

The good

For the job I have been offered the application process was super friendly and personal, there was an initial phone call with the internal talent team who tell you a little more about the role, followed by a first stage interview where I got to meet two of the managers and talk a little more in depth about the role. This was great because it meant I could get a bit of a feel for the people that I could be working with and see if I thought I was a good fit.

Then came the tech test, for my tech test I was asked to create a digital calculator, I had just over a couple of days to complete it and I was given a lot of freedom in the tech choices I could make for the test so I could really showcase what I could do.

I decided to go with React and TypeScript as React is something that we cover on the course, but TypeScript is something that I was using in my final project for the course, so I thought why not?

My second interview was great, we got to go over my tech test and my decisions and getting to meet existing members of the team was ace, and I get to talk to the people that could tell me even more about the day-to-day of the potential job!

This was such a positive interview and tech test experience and I was overjoyed when they offered me the role! I wanted to share how good it was so other new devs know that tech tests aren't all awful and there's some really good places out there that have interview processes really well thought through and suited to juniors, keep looking and you'll find the right place for you!

What's next?

I start my new job on the 17th August, and I'm going to devote a lot of time to getting settled into the team and up to date with the code base I'll be working on.

Other than that, I'm certain this will be my last blog post in this series as it has fulfilled its purpose in many ways. I wanted to mainly do it to keep myself motivated throughout the course, as well as for potential employment purposes.

I've enjoyed the blogging experience a lot more than I thought I would, and might return to it after a little while, with some newly found wisdom from my first dev job.

Thank You

A huge thank you to anyone reading to the very end, and an even bigger one if you've read each instalment of the series. Keep your eyes peeled for any more in future and of course, follow me on GitHub, LinkedIn, and here on Dev.to.

My Dev Journey: Week 14

Fearne York — Sun, 08 Aug 2021 13:09:20 +0000

This week was the final week of the Northcoders bootcamp that I have been on. It's been an absolute blast, and getting to know the tutors and other students on the cohort has been one of the biggest pleasures.

I've learnt so much in the space of 14 weeks, things I never thought I'd be able to do. It's gone so fast and it's kind of crazy to think where I'll be in another 3 months time.

If you've enjoyed this blog post, maybe consider checking out my GitHub 😁

What's happened this week

Finished our group project

We spent the first three days of this week finishing off our app. For those who didn't see last week, our app is all about maintaining the motivation to achieve goals that you set for yourself, by setting you up in a group with friends so that you hold each other accountable for reaching you goals.

We spent the Monday finishing off our backend, and then the four of us all started working on the frontend together and getting that looking more polished than our initial styling.

Presented our app

On the Thursday we recorded our app demo and created our presentation. Then on the Friday, we rehearsed our presentation many times, and watched all of our peers present their apps to us and on a live stream. I have studied remotely for the most part of the course, but travelled into the Manchester campus for the day to present my app with the rest of my team, which was a great experience.

You can watch the whole livestream here, where my team was the last to present, starting at 3:31:24, but the link takes you to that timestamp.

Finished Northcoders

As soon as we finished our presentation, the livestream ended, and at that point everyone on the cohort had officially finished the course. We finished off with some beer and pizza in the office, as well as going out for a drink with everyone that was able to present in person.

I've had a great time on this course and feel like it has set me in a really good direction on the path to being a good developer.

What's next?

First of all, I'm going to have a week off, after what has been a very fast and incredibly intense experience. I'm hoping to write another blog post next week to round off this experience, but see where I get to from there.

Whether you've only read one of these blog posts or you've read all of them, thank you for reading to the end. I never would have thought I could write a blog post 15 weeks in a row, and definitely not that I could write a blog post series that has over 4300 total views so far.

Thank you all 🙏🏼

My Dev Journey: Week 13

Fearne York — Sun, 01 Aug 2021 12:40:21 +0000

This week of the bootcamp was our only full working week on our goal achievement app. This week has felt incredibly long, whilst at the same time has felt like we've had absolutely no time at all to work on our app.

I'm definitely feeling the fatigue of the intensive bootcamp now, having been working on what is the culmination of all 13 weeks of hard work up to this point has been very tiring, as well as preparing for interviews and tech tests after hours, and falling asleep in front of the laptop. But the end is one week away and I can have a rest afterwards, before hopefully starting a job 🤞🏼

If you've enjoyed this blog post, maybe consider checking out my GitHub 😁

What's happened this week

Front End

We started with our front end and worked from our wireframe prototypes, to create the navigation of our app. We started off in a mob to get the foundations working, then when we all felt comfortable with the process, we broke off into pairs to carry on with individual pages.

Pair programming was great for this, as we still had many questions about how to build these pages, and put in components with dummy data, so it was useful to have one driver coding out what we knew, and then the navigator looking up information at the same time. Because of this, we managed to get our whole navigation implemented on day one. Then by the end of day two we had our front end pulling data from a test backend.

Back End

I spent the most of this week working with the backend, and the biggest struggle has been getting used to the non-relational database over the relational SQL based databases.

Both the test backend and the final backend were created in Firebase using Firestore collections and Firestore functions. And they interface with the Front End through the Express based API I've created. The other big struggle with this has been writing the whole thing in TypeScript over JavaScript and getting used to the nuances between the two.

New tech I've started learning

Firebase

The Diligent Dev's tutorial on creating a REST API using Firebase was a great springboard to work from.

Also, the Firebase docs are pretty good too for most of the troubleshooting but the thing that's helped me the most is just trying things out and experimenting with the data structures for the most part.

My Dev Journey: Week 12

Fearne York — Sun, 25 Jul 2021 20:58:02 +0000

This is the section of the course that the previous 11 weeks of work have led up to, and it's felt great to get started! The format of this week and the coming weeks may be a bit different than the previous weeks, as we started our final project phase!

If you've enjoyed this blog post, maybe consider checking out my GitHub 😁

What's happened this week

Version control in teams

We started the week off by getting together in our newly assigned teams, to have a play around with version control in a team as opposed to in the usual pairing set-up. This was good to have a small play around with before we got stuck into the project, so we can hopefully minimise the issues once we start on our more valuable code!

Idea generation and pitching

Each of the team members came up with ideas for an app, and then posed these to the rest of the team. We then decided on the best three and fleshed out these ideas with what we the MVP's for the app would be, and tech ideas, plus user stories.

We presented these ideas to the Northcoders tutors for feedback on ideas, and luckily they liked each of our ideas, so we ended up deciding on the one that appealed to all of the most during our ideation stage.

Our project

Our idea is a behaviour tracking app that helps solidify the positive behaviour by having the users be in teams to hold them accountable to each other for the progress towards their goals.

I'm really excited to work on this app, and especially with my team, because they're like minded people and we've had a great start to our project where we're in agreement about almost all things. And we're all interested in branching out into new bits of tech, and getting more experience, no matter how brief, into new tech that could shape what kind of dev work we want to do.

We've had a lot of challenges at the back half of this week when testing new bits of tech and finding our feet with it, but I'd much rather find these issues now, rather than set out starting out starting making the app, and then find were we went wrong.

New tech I've started learning

Svelte

One of the first bits of tech we decided to look into was Svelte, the main decision behind this was because we'd heard a great deal of praise for it, and wanted to try our hand at picking up something a new piece of tech that was outside what we've been taught in the course.

So far, I'm really enjoying the way Svelte is written, it looks a lot friendlier and is much more approachable at a glance and I'm really enjoying that the CSS is scoped by default to each component.

TypeScript

TypeScript was a pretty obvious choice to extend our tech stack with, as a superset of JS it allows certain quality of life improvements that come in handy when working in teams, and not having to worry about type coercion.

I followed a TS video to sketch out some basics in a repo, and I'm looking to get a little more hands on with it in the next few days but so far I'm really enjoying playing around with a statically typed language.

NativeScript

We started looking at NativeScript as we are thinking about going down the route of Svelte Native and as that's built using NativeScript, we thought I'd be a good idea to get a bit of familiarity with this.

After a few false starts with NativeScript, and us nearly having to give up on using it, we found the NativeScript Playground tutorial to actually be one of the best ways to get stuck in with NativeScript.

Resources I've found useful this week

Svelte Blog

This Svelte blog post was a really good start into following a tutorial and how to get going with Svelte.

HalfNelson's Github

HalfNelson's Github repos have been a really valuable resource to be able to see some examples of how to use Svelte and there's some great starter repos to use to get to grips with Svelte and SvelteNative.

CodeSTACKr Typescript Crash course

I followed this TS video to learn about some of the basics of TypeScript, what I've seen so far it's been really clear and easy to follow so I can get up to speed with TypeScript as fast as possible.

NativeScript Playground and Docs

As mentioned before the NativeScript Playground has been great to get to grips with so far. Their docs have also been a great resource too.

My Dev Journey: Week 11

Fearne York — Sun, 18 Jul 2021 12:10:51 +0000

This week was the final week of the front-end block of my Northcoders bootcamp, and this week focussed on creating the React front-end for the Express/Postgres back-end I created a few weeks ago.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

Applying learning from past two weeks

Because this is the last week of the front end block, we focussed on tying everything we've learnt in the past two weeks together to work with our backend projects, mine being hy-games, an api I created to query for information about board game reviews, and review votes and comments.

Composition

A key lesson this week was learning to recognise when different parts of our sites use similar functionality, and how we can reuse our code to make less work for ourself in the long run when considering scalability.

For example I needed two separate parts of the site to open and close, and the easiest way is to create a component that open and closed on a button click by setting state. Then by passing other components in as children to the pop-up function, and conditionally render them based on the button click state.

Custom React Hooks

Creating custom React hooks, was a great way to extract out functionality to a functional component, much that same as creating reusable JSX components, they're great when considering how to cut down on repeating yourself as your site or app grows in scale.

There's been a few time this week where I've found the balance between extracting everything out to functional components, whether thats JSX or hooks, to be quite tricky and is definitely something that is going to take some more time and context to understand their best use-cases.

Resources I've found useful this week

Figma

Figma again! Like I said in my last blog post, Figma is a pretty good way to quickly and collaboratively mock up the wireframes for an app and definitely helped us to start planning out what actually needed to be done first, rather than start aimlessly coding.

React Router

Again like last week, React Router has also been great for seeing examples of setting up React Apps with Routing.

My Dev Journey: Week 10

Fearne York — Sun, 11 Jul 2021 12:45:34 +0000

This week was the second week in the front end block of the course, and this week we spent a lot of time going further in depth with React.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

Data fetching

For the start of this week we used the Fetch API to make requests to endpoints to get the data back that we were going to be using in our apps. The fetch API was a good start but I prefered it when we started to use Axios, as I think it reads a lot clearer that fetch.

I spent most of this first day getting base functionality added in to my app that retrieves NASA Astronomy Pictures of the Day, for specified dates in input fields.

Styling with React

Building on top of the base functionality I added a couple of extra features in like beign able to search by a date range, and then got going on styling. I wanted it to be a fairly minimal site, but to use similar tones to the NASA logo, so that it all ties in, and was pretty happy with adjusting to styling with React.

One of the key principles from this lecture was on Mobile first design, and using media queries to display certain components styled in different ways because of screen sizes.

Another thing we learnt but I didn't have chance to apply was the use of CSS modules, something that I'd like to apply on a side project or by refactoring the code from this two-day sprint.

React Routing

Routing in React was a blessing after having spent the last week with really long App files. The routing makes sense, especially after creating our own backends, it made processes much more alike.

Context

Another issue I had with React at the start of the week was I felt like I was passing props through all over the place, which is where using Context allows me to have certain states to be seen globally across all components. This came in handy when wanting to tidy a lot of my prop chains up.

Resources I've found useful this week

CSS Tricks

CSS Tricks has been a great cheat-sheet style site, that has helped especially with flex-box bits.

React Router

React Router has also been great for seeing examples of setting up React Apps with Routing.

Figma

What's Figma? Figma is a pretty good way to quickly and collaboratively mock up the wireframes for an app and definitely helped us to start planning out what actually needed to be done first, rather than start aimlessly coding.

My Dev Journey: Week 9

Fearne York — Sun, 04 Jul 2021 11:34:10 +0000

This week was the start of the three week long Front-End block of the Northcoders bootcamp I'm on. We started off the week by creating mini-apps by manipulating information available to us using the DOM, then moving into React in the second half of the week.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

DOM manipulation

At the start of the week, we learnt how to access and manipluate what's on a webpage using JavaScript, it was great to learn out to make something interactive and have some more visual feedback on what I was doing than what you get when doing backend tasks.

To put these new skills into practice, we built a tic-tac-toe game and were very happy with the way it turned out, we didn't get around to styling it, and instead focussed on the functionality, but the styling is something that would be good to come back to.

Form validation

This covered learning how to make form fields required, using RegEx to do form field validation on things like emails and URLs to make sure the user provides the correct information, and learning how to get the values from submitted forms.

We built a meme generator that took two input fields for top text, and bottom text, and then a third input field that takes an image URL. We used RegEx to validate the url and the condition that as long as there was either top or bottom text entered, the form would allow you to submit the form to generate the meme.

React

For my first day using React, I built a pizza parlour site, that would use buttons to add and remove pizzas from a basket, clear the basket and confirm an order. I had heavy influence from Crazy Pedro's and Dough Boys Pizza in the naming and pizza types! I was really happy to get stuck into React and build something functional with it, I'm really happy with how it turned out and how much I was able to do in such a short time. Keep an eye out because I plan to finish the pizza parlour project off and show off what I can do!

But here's a demo of what it looks like so far!

// Detect dark theme var iframe = document.getElementById('tweet-1410293551536263169-688'); if (document.body.className.includes('dark-theme')) { iframe.src = "https://platform.twitter.com/embed/Tweet.html?id=1410293551536263169&theme=dark" }

React mini-app

For the last two days this week, we were building a working calculator using React, and taking advantage of states that React allows us to use, over methods like closure that we have been used to using. I'd really like to get this calculator full functional and styled when I have some spare time to put on my portfolio site.

Resources that I've found useful this week

I Hate Regex

I hate Regex is a great site that has prebuilt regex strings, as well as details on how they work, as well as some wicked diagrams that show the flow of the logic.

Interneting is hard

Interneting is hard is another great site that has a very comprehensive beginners guide to HTML and CSS, it's a great ready through in the mornings before starting off

My Dev Journey: Week 8

Fearne York — Sun, 27 Jun 2021 12:07:16 +0000

This week was careers week on my coding bootcamp, and as such this week was a lot less new concept heavy as many of the previous weeks have been. Instead of new technologies we had a few lectures on CV writing, portfolio preparation, and technical tests.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've done this week

Whilst I created my first development CV during this week the two most important things I've done this week were completing a back-end project I worked on during the back-end portion of the course, this involved a broad scope of unit and integration testing. And then once I was happy with the functionality of my API I hosted it on Heroku which what the first time I've hosted anything. And then I got to write my first README for the repo, and I wanted to make this one as good as I could becasue it's the first I've written and I've really enjoyed this project and didn't want to half-do the last thing 😁

But by far the thing I'm most excited about this week, is buying my first domain for my portfolio site, and creating my first front-end project. We've not done the front end block of the course (this starts next week) but I wanted to complete a portfolio site that I could link to in my CV, for job applications (if any hiring managers are reading my blog still on week 8, then please hire me 😅) and socials too! My portfolio uses a bootstrap template but I went through and dipped my toes in the luke warm waters of HTML and CSS to make it match a style closer to my CV styling.

Resources I've found useful this week

Setting up google domains on GitHub pages

This dev article was really useful in helping guide through setting up my newly minted domain, with github pages, as well as the GitHub Pages docs.

Bootstrap docs

The bootstrap docs were crucial for my brief intro to HTML and CSS work.

Design inspiration

Canva was pretty useful in getting design inspiration for structure of my CV, I then created my CV in Affinity Publisher, which took a fair bit of getting used to again, because I'm much more used to Adobe InDesign

My Dev Journey: Week 7

Fearne York — Sun, 20 Jun 2021 17:48:14 +0000

This week was the last week in the Back-End block of the Northcoders bootcamp, this week focused on taking everything we had learnt in the previous 2 weeks and applying it to create a working back-end of a project. I also had my first code review this week, which went really well and it was great to get feedback on what to improve and what was going well.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

Async / Await

We'd previously been shown how to do asynchronous functions using Promises and then blocks, so this was all about learning how to write asynchronous code in a different way. I've definately found async await easier to read then Promises which has made them easier to work with for me but I have from myself accidently mixing the two together a bit!

Advanced Error Handling

This section focussed a lot on how to error handle our database queries more indepth, we used tools like pg-format for formatting query strings and also error first functions with the idea of passing those errors out of our database interactions into the different error handling middleware we created.

It was great to be able to reuse errors across db queries to help keep my codebase clean, and learning about extra error handling also helped with trickier errors for tables with forgien keys.

Aggregate SQL queries

Making aggregate queries, like adding JOIN, WHERE and LIKE operations to my existing queries allowed me to learn to more efficient queries to the database rather than stitching multiple queries together. It's been good to learn where these are more appropriate to use over some JavaScript solutions I originally came up with that makes my code more efficient especially at a larger scale.

Hosting with Heroku

Towards the end of the week we' learned how to host a PSQL DB and express server using Heroku. It was great to finally be able to understand how to put something I've made out there for other people to see and not just be something that is running on my laptop.

Resources I've found useful this week

Unlike most weeks where we've had a lot of new information introduced to us in quick succession, this week was all about rounding off our understanding and applying to the back-end of a project that we will make the front-end for in the coming weeks. So with that in mind I reflected back on previous code and notes of my own to apply to this week's project!

Postgresql documentation

The documentation has been great to use to sense check my queries and make sure they're doing what I'm intending, especially with more complex queries.

Node-Postrgres

The docs for the node-postgres modules are also fantastic, especially for getting small code snippets from and double checking my syntax is correct.

Northcoders Notes

They're in here everyweek but the folks at Nortcoders really do a great job with the notes. Just going back over the notes that have been written for us is fantastic, because there's been several times where I've gone back and re-read the notes ina completely new light, and that clarity is great.

My Dev Journey: Week 6

Fearne York — Sun, 13 Jun 2021 19:29:00 +0000

I've just finished the second week of the back-end block, and wow it was a tough week! So many ups and downs across the week as a whole, and also within each day.

In short what I'll say about this week is that it has been a challenge, and that's recognised by all of the tutors at Northcoders that this is one of the hardest weeks on the whole course. As next week we're going to be recapping all of this content to cement the knowledge a little more.

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

Node Postgres

The week started off with a solo sprint, covering Node Postgres which is a collection of modules that make it easy to commnuicate with the PSQL databases we were setting up. All in all, this day flew by and it was the first time I fully completed a sprint, both solo and paired, so I felt really good about the way I was handling back-end!

Supertest, Error Handling, and Routers

Next up, I spent two days pulling my hair out over integrating supertest into our tests to make use of integration testing over the unit tests we've previously been focused on. As well as error handling with Express, and establishing routers into our repo's. All at the same time as juggling structuring our repo's in the MVC (Model, View, Controller) pattern.

It's safe to say my head was spinning after cramming all of that into two days, and feeling like I had to adjust my entire way of thinking. I think I spent the best part of two days on help Zoom's with the amazing tutors, and venting to other students about it all the way.

Seeding and Creating Complex Queries

Having spent the past two days spiraling and feeling like I'm getting nowhere, I decided to ask that I could work alone for this pairs sprint, because I knew I didn't have a solid understanding of what was going to be asked of me that day, and didn't want to hold anyone back where they may have felt confident, and also partially becasue I had a great deal of anxiety about it and knew I didn't want to spend the best part of two days feeling useless again.

I think I definitely made the right call on this just taking some me time, because I actually spent most of the first day of the sprint, going back over the content from the previous sprint, to have a solid foundation of what's to come. Learning to re-seed the database with each of the tests and using JavaScript to make SQL commands was great fun, and brilliant way to mesh the two languages. As well as getting to make some more complex queries to the database, by appending operations like ORDER BY and parameter like ASC and DESC to sort them in various ways.

Resources I've found useful this week

W3Schools

Similar to last week, W3Schools is an briliant resource for JS and SQL queries, as well as many other languages.

Node-Postrgres

The docs for the node-postgres modules are also fantastic for the work we've been doign this week.

Northcoders Notes

Consistently, just going back over the notes that have been written for us is fantastic, because there's been several times where I've gone back and re-read the notes ina completely new light, and that clarity is great.

My Dev Journey: Week 5

Fearne York — Sun, 06 Jun 2021 18:22:06 +0000

This week was another 4 day week, thanks to the bank-holiday Monday we had, whilst I was itching to get going this week, it was really refreshing to split two distinct parts of the bootcamp up, by having a long weekend.

This week is the start of the back-end block, and just like the JavaScript fundementals block it will last for 3 weeks, and oh boy has it been a fun start to the world of backend!

If you've enjoyed any of my blog series, then maybe consider following me on GitHub 😁

What I've learnt this week

Node HTTP

We started our first week in back-end off by creating our own local servers using the node HTTP module, whilst it was fun to start the back-end section, I couldn't help but think there was better way to do this every step of the day.

Express.js

As is common now at Northcoders, we get shown a way to accomplish a goal, usually in a legacy or verbose way, that we can then build upon the fundemental understanding with frameworks or modern tools that can improve your workflow as a developer. This is especially true of the idea of moving from Node's HTTP module, to something like Express.js. We started out by refactoring our code from Day 1, but in a way that uses Express to make the whole process a little less bloated.

MVC Pattern

We also spent some time learning about the MVC pattern and implementing the ideas into some working examples. The MVC has been good to learn because a concern of mine was with how needlessly large some of the files were becomming for our app sprints.

Introduction SQL

Wow! I really enjoyed starting to work with SQL, its been great to take a small break at the back end of this week, and dip my toes into the luke warm waters of another language. I can for sure see why many people on the course preferred to not do the SQL stuff, but I actually really enjoyed it.

Resources I've found useful this week

SQLBolt

For sure, SQLBolt was a lot of fun, and for me a great way of picking up the basics of SQL in small chunks and easily digestible. My only advice is get a solid understanding of the difference of longitude and latitude, because in my head the words kind of mesh together and lose all meaning (just because I was fidelling around with the longitude/latitude challenge for ages).

Insomnia

Insomnia was great for sending and receiving data to the local servers we were creating and display all the info I need at this stage in a really simple way.

Express.js and Node HTTP docs

The Express docs and the Node HTTP docs have been great for answering queries in a quick way as usual with all of the relavant docs to all of the tech we've used so far at Northcoders.

W3Schools

W3Schools is an absolutely fantastic resource for any JS and SQL queries, as well as many other languages.

My Dev Journey: Week 4

Fearne York — Sun, 30 May 2021 20:05:38 +0000

Week 4 marks the end of the JavaScript Fundamentals block! Wow this has been a big challenge but I feel so happy looking back at what I can do now as opposed to just three weeks ago. This (along with a three day bank-holiday weekend 🍻) have spurred me on to be even more excited to move onto the next three block of the course, all about Backend development!

Thanks for checking out this blog entry, and consider following me on GitHub to see when I post more updates, and keep track of how I find the Backend block of the course.

What I've learnt this week

Revision

We started the week off with solo sprint of recapping a lot of the content we have covered in the previous two weeks, this was so welcomed! It feels like we've been going a mile a minute over the past two weeks, so to have to reflective time where everyone can take stock of where they're at in the course and to brush up on some of the fundamental concepts has been wonderful.

Our recap covered topics like array methods, closures, Object-Orient Programming, and recursion.

Async

We dedicated two whole days to Async, and it was great to get familiar with a concept I'd heard a lot about, but never seen implemented into code. I have to say that this is something that puzzled me, but I couldn't stop thinking about. Several times over the two days I found myself zoned out in the middle of a task like washing the dishes, eating tea, or showering, and then snapping too realising that I had spaced out. Perhaps I was starting to live asynchronously 🤔

API's and Promises

The final two days covered working with dummy API requests as well as getting data from API's like the Star Wars API, and the Pokémon API. As well as using amazing tools like fs, axios, and inquirer. And this was a whole lot of fun, especially using inquirer to provide an input to the code rather than taking it as a hard coded input.

Resources I've found useful this week

fs, axios, and inquirer documentation, went I'm picking things up for the first time well-written documentation full of examples is really useful to me
Fun API's to practice with! We've been using the Star Wars API and Pokémon API so far and I'm excited to find more
And as always the Northcoders notes!