DEV Community: Andrei Neagu

Full Stack open 2023 Part 12

Andrei Neagu — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 15:16:56 +0000

In today's world, containers revolutionized how we program and deploy applications.

Docker is the most mature, documented and with the most amazing community containerization engine.

In this post I will share my experiences with part12 of Full Stack open. I feel like the tutorial really helped to introduce me to the main concepts of Docker, that is how to build images with Dockerfile scripts and how to manage containers with Compose.

Throughout the assignments you get to work with Node, Mongo, Redis,Nginx and other images. You also learn about volumes, bind mounts, the Docker network and DNS.

My favorite part was developing directly inside a container.
This has so many benefits when working on a large project. I will consider adding Docker to my workflow.

Full Stack open 2023 Part 13

Andrei Neagu — Wed, 19 Apr 2023 20:39:48 +0000

PostgreSQL, it is truly amazing an open source DB can be so good.

I have some mixed feelings about this part of FSO. The best part is that it allowed me to stop being afraid of SQL.

Background

I started this tutorial with absolutely no SQL experience. Because of that, the first step for me was to lean some SQL using SQL Bolt. It did it's job. That is to teach me some basic queries in browser.

Review

Part 13 is quite long. I started with deploying a PostgreSQL instance on fly.io .
Then, a low point of the tutorial IMO is the fact that the author went with Sequelize, a popular ORM. I simply do not see the value of an ORM to learn SQL. You have to use it for all exercises.

The bones of the tutorial are good, you learn about one-to-many and many-to-many relationships in detail. You learn about migrations using umzug. That is a part I loved because it solves so many problems with your schema. Each change of your schema is a .js file in your filesystem.

A nice touch was the last exercise where you need to use a server side session instead of a JWT for auth. You have more freedom here. I ended up using plain old cookies. You don't learn this in the original part of FSO.

Pros and cons

Pros:

It cured me of the fear of databases
I learned about database migrations
I learned basic SQL
I learned the tools of the trade

Cons:

You use raw SQL rarely
Sequelize (I had to fight it)
No stored procedures/functions

Part 13 score: 7/10

Full Stack open 2022 review

Andrei Neagu — Sun, 05 Feb 2023 17:36:47 +0000

Personal thoughts

I want to give FSO the strongest recommendation as it is one of the best tutorials I ever did. I started the tutorial in my final year of university as I had a gap in my practical web skills. A con of a Computer Science degree is that it can be too theoretical.

The core part is the full stack parts (React and Node).
I did not get to finish all the parts, only the core portion. The rest will follow soon.

Every part takes an average of 40 hours to complete. Sometimes I read more about a subject to be satisfied.

Pros

The course has assignments. You really learn by solving problems and doing. Video only courses are bad.
You work on a front-end and back-end. You learn and apply concepts and refactor your app along the way.
Modern React with hooks and Redux toolkit.
Express.js with Mongo Atlas and REST. You think about logging and apply various libraries.
Unit testing with Jest and E2E testing with Cypress. This is really helpful in bigger projects.
It is updated every year.
It prepares you for a job.

Who is this for

A person with programming skills that wants to learn about React and web development. FSO is hard and time consuming.