DEV Community: oliverfeher

Final Project - Flatiron

oliverfeher — Thu, 18 Jun 2020 05:29:03 +0000

HeyKids!

I have been waiting patiently for the immersive full-time cohort to end. I'm not it wasn't challenging at all, but I honestly never really felt under pressure.

Final project review has come. I wanted to build something different than the majority students build like, twitter/facebook clones, recipe apps, google maps app just something beyond CRUD.....

I decided to build an education application for children called HeyKids! that teaches math, pronunciation, and vocabulary. I wanted to implement IBM's Watson AI for Speech Recognition, but I was running into issues with Rails and IBM's SDK, so I started working with Google's Speech API.

Login System

I used JWT for authentication and to maintain user's logged in state, on server side BCyrpt encryption magic is taking care of storing sensitive user information.

State management

Redux-Thunk. I feel like the learning curve on Redux is insane. In the beginning you honestly have zero idea what's going on, but once you get comfortable with it, it's super easy.

You also have to keep that in mind that these actions are async.

Voice Recoginion

Google Voice API Speech-To-Text
Honestly it didn't take me to long to learn how to use the API, the docs are amazing.

Game

The game has three categories:

Math problem solving
Word spelling exercise
Identifying objects based on a picture

Each section have different gamerules. If you give the correct answer you get a "score" else you get a "mistake" that persist to the database right away, and renders to client side through a Redux action.

Here is a demo video about how the game works and operates. I'm planning to deploy it on laptop/desktop browsers, and I have already started working on a React Native app for cell phones and tablets.

Keep coding,
Olly

Flatiron's mod4

oliverfeher — Tue, 12 May 2020 14:42:32 +0000

Hello, devs!

Today marks the day when I start my last module at Flatiron's software engineering immersive full-time coding boot camp.

Module 4 covered the fundamentals and core concepts of JavaScript, developing RoR API, client-server communication.

For this mod, I have actually built multiple projects, to get a deep understanding of vanilla JavaScript.

1, trackMyFinance

I have built a personal finance/bill tracking, mobile-focused application using D3.js.

2, You(r)Lister

This project uses Youtube's API to search and render videos from YouTube. The user is able to create and modify playlists, add/delete videos from them.

The last module will cover React/Redux with Rails API. I'm very excited about this section and graduating very soon.

Olly

Alpha Shoes / Flatiron Bootcamp project mod3

oliverfeher — Fri, 10 Apr 2020 03:47:58 +0000

Time flies

Another month passed by at Flatiron School. I was about 3 weeks ahead of the course, so I had plenty of time to study on the side. I started reading Cracking the Code Interview and C# in depth.

Monthly overview

This module we pretty much learned everything about Ruby on Rails. Generators, partials, routings, action views and nested forms, HTTP requests and so on. I must say, that RoR is definitely not my favorite framework but you can jumpstart an app pretty easily. I understand now why startups choose RoR for their stack.

On the technical side, I really like how Rails is organizing routes to keep them RESTful. Routes, action views, and controllers are closely linked together, it makes it easy for the dev to build fast and efficiently.

  resources :users, only: [:new, :create, :edit, :update] do
    resource :orders, only: [:create, :show]
    resource :cart, only: [:show, :create, :destroy]
    resource :details, only: [:new, :show]
  end

I dislike the generators and the scaffolds a lot. It might be a swift way to create models, routes, and controllers for the MVC pattern, however, it generates so many files that are unnecessary and takes effort to collect all this garbage. I believe to focus on writing clean and DRY code is more important than speed.

The idea

I love shoes, so I decided I'm going to build an online shoe store. Designing mobile-first but also available for desktop. Rails back-end, HTML5, CSS3, ES6 JS. No JS framework was required, so I decided it could be a great way to practice DOM manipulation, fetch, and vanilla JS patterns. I use PostgreSQL as my DB.

The project:

Live Demo
Alpha Shoes

Source Code
GitHub

Here is a sneak peek to the mobile version of the app:

I built the app in about 8 days, including the designing process with Adobe XD/Illustrator. I made sure I had good planning/testing and prototyping phase before I went into actually writing code.

A flowchart about my database and its associations:

A mobile layout from the designing phase:

I honestly feel like I didn't run into any major challenges while building this project, and that is probably the benefit of the detailed testing and planning. I would like to add Stripe to it as my Payment Gateway Processor so it would be 100% realistic.

Desktop Version

Future plans

I'm going to be focusing on studying a lot on the side, read books, complete a few more computer-science classes. My next project with Flatiron should have the requirement something similar to what I've built this time. As a personal project in the upcoming weeks, I'm planning on building a data visualization app about CO2 emission in the United States using D3js. Also, I promised my son that I'm going to make him a simple iPad game using C# and Unity Engine so I'm super excited about that.

I keep having to remind myself, to keep my focus on the bootcamp's stacks and requirements, but sometimes my passion for technology and software just takes over and I can't seem to able to hold my creativity and the "I want to learn everything" mindset back.

I will make a few minutes long demo video about the app, but I rather have you try it out yourself than listening to me on YouTube. Feedbacks are welcomed!

Until next time,
Olly

Sinatra MVC boot camp project

oliverfeher — Sun, 08 Mar 2020 05:22:52 +0000

Good evening engineers,

Things are starting to speed up here at Flatiron School. I'm doing a lot of outside of boot camp studying, researching, exploring, connecting with other devs. I was able to build a functional "full-stack" project for this module. Let's dive in!

Oliver Feher

@oliver92f

This week I'm going to be working on an MVC project using Ruby, Sinatra ( lightweight Ruby framework) with a PostgreSQL database, along with vanilla JavaScript. Take a sneak peek at the landing page.

#ruby #softwareengineer #javascript #coding #postgresq…lnkd.in/dNNHrG3

07:04 AM - 02 Mar 2020

2 2

The project

The FlatironCROSS Clinic .. I know I should've named it something like Gray's anatomy, but I thought this is more RESTful!!!

This assignment requires the students to use Models Views and Controllers, and basic CRUD functions. The views are rendered with ERB templates, for the models we are using ActiveRecord, and finally, there is a Rack server running in the background.

I'm using pure CSS3, HTML5, and ES6 JS for my front-end. Ruby is my main language for this project along with a Sinatra framework. I have a SQLite3 database for development and a PostgreSQL database for production connected.

How it works

I have multiple tables in my database, and they are associated with each other with has_many, has_many through, belongs_to relationships. Sign-up and Log-in/out abilities with password and e-mail address validation/authentication via BCrypt.

The app is available for patients and for employees of the clinic. Employees are able to confirm or cancel appointments. They are also able to prescribe medications for patients and edit their personal records.

Patients are able to book appointments with their selected doctors, leave reviews, view their medications, and edit their personal information.

Here is the reviews section, where all reviews are posted anonymously, with a timestamp on them and a 1-5 rating. Unter the H1 tag, the average rating is being calculated.

My favorite parts/challenges

1, For the doctor's section, whenever they select a patient appointment request, it sends a GET request via JavaScript, and the server responds with a JSON file that I use to create a User object and manipulate its data. JS also appends a child container that has multiple P tags with the patient's information.

2, Doctor's pending appointment section, ERB template generates all the pending requests, with their own unique cancel and confirm button that send POST requests to update/delete data via an each method that looks like this:

<% @pending_apts.each do |x| %>                            
                    <div class="generate_grid">
                        <p class="generate_p">Request from: <%=x.user.detail.full_name%></p>
                        <p class="generate_p">DOB: <%=x.user.detail.dob%>, G: <%=x.user.detail.gender%>, Cell: <%=x.user.detail.phone_number%></p><br>
                        <div class="cancel_confirm">

                            <form method="POST" action="/appointment/update">
                                <input type="hidden" id="hidden" name="<%=x.id%>">
                                <input type="submit" class="button" value="Confirm">
                            </form>

                            <form method="POST" action="/appointment/delete">
                                <input type="hidden" id="hidden" name="<%=x.id%>">
                                <input type="submit" id="m-red" class="button" value="Cancel">
                            </form>
                        </div>
                    </div>
                <%end%>

A complete demo video is available under this youtube link where I explain how everything works.

Conclusion

I will definitely spend some more time with the project to clean-up code, refactor, make it responsive so it will be available for all screen sizes. I'm going to deploy to Heroku once all the listed above are completed.

There is a one week break coming up, in a week. I'm a little ahead of the curriculum, and our next module is Ruby on Rails. I'm super excited about it!! During the next two weeks, I will be learning and practicing with the (M)ongodb (E)xpressjs (R)eactjs (N)odejs stack.

Definitely made with LOVE!
Have a great weekend,
Olly

1 month deep into boot camp + capstone project

oliverfeher — Wed, 12 Feb 2020 01:18:19 +0000

Dear DEVs,

Summary:

We are heading into the second month of the Flatiron Software Engineering boot camp. The second module mainly focuses on SQL( and extensions), ORMs and ActiveRecord, HTML and CSS(SCSS), and Sinatra. Essentially this module is going to end with a creation of an MVC project using the listed stacks above.

That being said, we've come to the end of the first module which means a capstone project is due. It had to be a CLI application using object-oriented Ruby.

Idea:

Basketball and the NBA have always been a big part of my life, so my idea was inspired by the professional basketball league. I wanted to list all the thirty teams with their current roster, each team's general information (for example their arena name or the year when the franchise was founded), and a few paragraphs about the NBA itself.

I wanted to make sure, that the user is able to navigate the app easily, it has multiple choices, and it displays enough information about not only the content but myself as well. This was all up to my CLI class.

Execution:

With a graphical appearance idea in my head and an execution plan, I was ready to build. I would scrape the team list from wikipedia.com create thirty instances of teams using the scraped data. Scrape the rosters from nba.com and the team properties with universal scraping methods that could be used for any team that is passed in.

I also made a very simple wireframe based on how I imagined the user interface.

Here is a demonstration on YouTube about navigating and using the app!

You can try it if you click here or shown with source code below:
// I recommend using the "here" link due to the small embedded repl window //

One of my biggest obstacles while creating this app was the thirty different urls for the teams. With the help of my technical coach we were able to find a way, and pair-program this solution.

def update_from_wiki                                     
   url = "https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/#{name.split(' ').join('_')}"
   hash_from_wiki = Scraper.get_team_info(url)
   update_from_hash(hash_from_wiki)

   #https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atlanta_Hawks
   #https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boston_Celtics etc.   
end

The urls are all the same except the very end where the team name sits. I used the team instances name property (team.name) passed it into the url via interpolation.

Conclusion:

I am very satisfied with the final product. I believe, I was able to fulfill all the project requirements and did a little extra. I am always up for new challenges because essentially those what we learn from.

Thank you for reading,
Olly

Self-teach => Bootcamp => Pro /Oliver's journey/

oliverfeher — Sun, 26 Jan 2020 07:05:52 +0000

Hi coders!

This is a series of articles about my journey of becoming a software engineer.

A quick intro before I get started:

 let oliver_feher = {
    age: "27",
    location: "Raleigh, NC",
    role: "Software Engineer",
    languages: "Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JS, React",
    experience: "8 months",
    learning_method: "self-teach + boot camp",
    boot_camp: "Flatiron School"
}

My background:

I came from the aviation industry, I was an operations manager at a top tier airline. It was an amazing job, however, I've never felt that I was able to satisfy all the creativity, curiosity in me. I've always spent a lot of time with my computer, building my PC, playing video games, or editing videos with Adobe AE. I remember when I was in elementary school I built a website for my class using only MS Word. Long story short, I quit my job and I spent about 8 months self-teaching myself front-end technologies.

Why boot camp, why Flatiron ?

In my honest opinion, anybody can learn how to code, it is just a matter of time. I believe a human's most precious gift is time. They offer a 5 months immersive path (50-60hrs/week), along with an income share agreement, and a team of coaches and instructors.

It doesn't matter what boot camp you graduate if you don't have the soft skills (teamwork, work ethic, adaptability, communication), and the ability to build a network. I came with a mindset of doing whatever it takes, to make the most out of these five months. I'm reading books on the side, practicing on HackerRank , trying to be active on platforms like dev.to and Medium, etc.

The first week:

Since I spent most of my time pre-boot camp learning JavaScript (including React and Node), HTML, CSS my expectations of the difficulty of the first week's material were low. We started with Ruby then will move onto Rails. Ruby is a different language (CLI) than JS, different syntax but the same logic. I went through the content made sure I had a deep understanding of the fundamentals. In my opinion, once you know a language, you will learn the rest of them much easier. I spent most of my free time connecting with- and helping others via Zoom and Slack. Not only I was able to help my classmates understand the syntax or the logic, but I practiced teaching/explaining code or I was just talking about code in general. The community is very diverse (just a few countries to mention: UK, India, Jamaica, US, Spain), and I had the opportunity to connect with a lot of great people. Basically built a "talking on a daily basis" relationship with the guys who share the same mindset.

Here is little exercise we had:

Create a method that checks if the entered number is prime or not
Try to implement an algorithm
See my solution below:

Moving forward:

The school is from Monday to Friday, so on the weekends, I will continue to work on my side-projects and mastering the newly learned material. I am very excited to see what next week brings. I will post on a weekly basis about my experience and progress. If you are thinking about committing yourself to a boot camp, or just a software engineering roadmap, stay tuned!

I will see you guys next week!
Olly

The success story of mistakes

oliverfeher — Mon, 30 Dec 2019 22:07:52 +0000

I spend over 10 hours on a weekly basis listening to podcasts, reading articles, browsing different platforms for technical and career topics that are related to any field of IT.

The main titles for career articles are: "How I went from Janitor to DevOps", "Schoolteacher to JS Developer", "Zero to Hero in 6 months". I love these readings because it gives the reader encouragement, that it is possible to change your life, learn, practice and land a job in the IT industry.

These articles are very supportive, although I believe that we learn much more from our mistakes and other's mistakes. While these stories give you the end product of a journey, I think the journey full of obstacles, setbacks, mistakes provides more supplemental information for individuals.

People can relate to these failures and obstacles more because they most likely run into them as well throughout their journey. Reading about them, and learning about how others overcame them, gives motivation and guidance, that it is possible to push through. It gives them relief when they see that they are not the only ones who have to deal with these barriers.

"It is good to learn from your mistakes. It is better to learn from the other's."

After reading this article, kindly share your thoughts and ideas, how you overcame the setbacks and the obstacles you had in your career. Mention the biggest mistake you made, and what would you do differently if you had a chance to go back.

In my estimation, the diverse stories/ideas that this community offers will help to forge an ultimate kit, that helps people to stay driven and to remain on the path of being successful.

Looking forward to hearing from you!
Oliver