DEV Community: sunnyhagey

Phase-4: How did I get here?!

sunnyhagey — Thu, 08 Dec 2022 18:52:06 +0000

I think maybe it is a surprise to me more than it is to anyone else that I have made it all the way to the end of Phase 4 at FlatIron.

Never did I think I would endeavor to start this journey, but to think that I would actually reach the near-end to it? Unimaginable.

I have failed utterly to have a blog that teaches anything about tech so I figured I would continue on that road.

I've never been quite sure what to say here when it comes to the end of the phases. Despite learning so, so much I never feel as if I'm at the liberty to teach you anything.

I don't think I've ever felt imposter syndrome this strong and this often before. Even when I was taking my EMS certification. I genuinely feel that saving a human life was easier than coding has ever been.

Communication with others has never been my strong point, which is why I've always felt I understood a computer better. However, computers are also bad at communicating with humans and very finicky (how relatable).

I guess I forgot to factor in that I am also a human (despite how hard I've tried to be the opposite) and I would also have a bit of an up and down relationship with my dear computer.

But we made it! We're here! Phase-5 is on the horizon! Do I deserve to be here? I'm unsure.

I'm currently in project mode, as I have been with all the other blogs I've quickly written in a panic.

We are at the point of building an entire frontend and backend. The frontend being React and the backend being Rails.

I've completely surprised myself by being more interested in backend and data handling. I'm an artist and have been drawing and making little artistic projects since I was young. I thought that the styling process of the front end would suit me better, but it's entirely the opposite.

It reminds me of being in school, when math started making sense more than anything else. Everything else felt nuanced, causing me to get caught up and confused by the subtle shades of grey. Math was black and white, it made sense.

However, being a full-stack developer means dealing with all shades and everything in between.

I have to learn to develop both skills fully in order to be a software engineer that any company would invite to their team.

Phase 5 is quickly approaching like an enemy in a video game where you hear the boss music playing long before you ever see them.

Let's see if, left to my own devices, I can come up with something that proves I've spent almost 15 weeks working my *** off.

See you then!

Flatiron Phase-3: Ruby and Finding my Voice

sunnyhagey — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 21:29:14 +0000

Here I am! I've made it all the way to the end of Phase 3 at Flatiron. During this phase we took a detour from Frontend development to Backend.

At first the entire prospect was a bit daunting to me. I was learning a new language and I wasn't going to see my progress show up directly in my browser anymore.

I quickly found that I actually enjoyed ruby and found that it made quite a lot of sense. I also found doing certain tasks with ruby so much simpler and a lot of the built in functionality was a breath of fresh air.

I found a few obstacles here and there, but that was mostly my habit of making things much more complicated than they needed to be.

I have learned a lot this phase! But, in my opinion, the best thing that I have learned, is that I have a passion. And by that I mean, I have found my voice/identity.

I have been wondering since the beginning, where I would find my special niche or if I even had one. What, despite my skills, would make me stand out?

Over the last few years I have noticed accessibility becoming more important when building an application. While it's more important, it is still a poorly researched and often forgotten, or at least left as a last minute add on.

As a disabled person, I have found the lack of care put into accessibility to be frustrating. There is this idea placed upon every disabled individual that we should try to live our lives as normally as possible, that we shouldn't let our disability "hold us back".

Unfortunately, for most of us, the very nature of our disability does, in fact, hold us back. However, with more accessible features and applications, our lives do become easier, but that is only if the applications are available and done well.

I want to be a voice for accessibility and inclusion. I want to make the uphill battle that those with disabilities face, just a little smaller.

It all begins with my current application. My phase 3 project. Hermes.

The name Hermes was chosen because he is the messenger of the gods and my app is meant to be used to make those who are nonverbal, semi-verbal, hard-of-hearing, or deaf have an easier time communicating.

Sign language does already exist, but the percentage of the regular public who aren't disabled and who don't communicate regularly with those unable to speak are very small.

There are also several apps created for this purpose already, but as someone who has had to use them, I can tell you that the best ones are incredibly expensive and the others are either made for children or abandoned. Sometimes both.

The app comes with a litany of pre-made phrases underneath categories (greetings, common, deaf, nonverbal, etc) as well as an option to add certain phrases to your favorites for quick usage. Eventually, I look to add a text-to-speech feature as well as an input to add your own remade phrases.

I also would love to have the appearance of the application customizable eventually, with the ability to change the color and icons for the phrases.

I built the api with ruby, using Sinatra and the frontend using React.

It's still in the beginning phases now and is hardly something to write home about, but I know with the coming phases perfect the appearance as well as the functionality.

I am proud to have found something important to me in this phase and, as much as I have enjoyed learning ruby, I think it is probably the best thing to have come out of it.

Flatiron Phase-2 (Fetching In React)

sunnyhagey — Fri, 28 Oct 2022 16:02:28 +0000

I suppose I could write a whole lot about Phase-2 at Flatiron. For this phase we stepped out of the safe comfort-zone of vanilla JS and moved into the new and exciting world of REACT.

This school has challenged me in a lot of ways, but mostly in being okay with the unknown. I can say with the utmost confidence that these past three weeks have been incredibly challenging, but I wouldn't change anything (okay, maybe some things).

In this post that I am once again writing on the last day because I've been entirely too focused on my project, I will be covering a few of the struggles I've had and one specific thing that I think needs to be addressed so that other's aren't struggling in the future.

At the beginning of this phase, where I was just starting to learn about REACT, it felt like new and foreign territory. No longer was I building elements within an html document and using a single JS document to apply effects to them.

In fact, in REACT, all that you need to use in the HTML is a

element with the id of "root".

And from there, all it takes is using npm to build out your REACT application for you and to create multiple components using JS files. Seems easy right?

Well, I got some news for you. If you are also jumping off the dangerous precipice of vanilla JS into REACT, there are a lot of new things you'll encounter.

I'd like to address useState() and useEffect() when it comes to fetching your information. For this example I'll be using JSON as the API.

Assuming you already know about importing when it comes to react, useState() and useEffect() are imported right alongside REACT.

To begin, you have to "set state" using the useState() hook. You want to set a state to any object you want to re-render on the page. In easiest terms I can use to explain this: anything you want to apply a change to on the page needs to begin with a state.

If you think about it, if you want to apply a change to anything it needs to begin somewhere correct?

So let's say we want to fetch some "items" and render them to the page. How would your items that are initially fetched from a JSON appear (before you have mapped over them) on the page? As an array, correct?

In this example we have set the state of "items" to an empty array.

If you were to check your components in console, you would see the state was an empty array.

Now, how do we go about populating this empty array with our items in our JSON? If you guessed a fetch, you are correct, but that's not exactly our next step.

Next, we have to apply our useEffect() hook. useEffect has two arguments. The first is your function. In this case it would be our fetch function. The second argument is optional and is an array of dependencies.

In our case, for a fetch function it would look like this:

Now we can use our fetch function. Assuming you have set both your baseUrl and your url for your items to a variable (which you should get used to, because it is a good practice) our fetch would look something like this:

In this example we are using the usual fetch but we are populating our empty array with the items fetched from our JSON.

Now, mapping over this array and getting our items to display on the page is an entirely different monster and I can go over that on a different post.

I hope this information was detailed enough and you learned something! If need be, I can always answer any questions or concerns.

Thanks for reading.

-Sunny

First Post: FlatIron Phase -1

sunnyhagey — Fri, 07 Oct 2022 16:44:11 +0000

Hello, everyone! Welcome to my first post.

If any of you have attended FlatIron it wouldn't surprise you at all to learn that I am rushing to write this before I have to present my Phase-1 project. I also haven't eaten today because I've been too distracted with my face in the computer, fiddling with my code.

My instructor kindly made me set up an alarm to remind me to eat at the scheduled lunch time after the third day I didn't eat because I was so invested in my code. However, I can also just turn off the alarm and keep working. Much too easy.

I'm not sure how much tech talk I'm prepared to do yet, considering I feel like I've barely dipped my toe into the tech world. But, I can say that this experience has been equal parts frustrating and rewarding.

I'm sure you all know what I mean.

const frustrating = yelling at the stupid machine until it does what I say

const rewarding = the code works and there aren't errors and everything happened the way I wanted

This course is definitely teaching me something I needed to learn dearly: Failure does not mean I'm a failure. Errors are just proof I'm moving forward, that I'm doing something.

Now, I can't say I always feel like that, but it's getting easier to remember as the weeks of coding go by.

This first Phase has been a doozy. I feel as if I have simultaneously been in this course for all of my life and for less than two days. I am learning more than I ever have and faster than I thought I could.

As much as I have enjoyed it, I do feel like the first phase is a bit much, especially for beginners who have never even looked at code. The pre-work for the course, I feel, should have been addressed and gone over a bit more before we hopped into DOM manipulation and CRUD.

I am looking forward to moving out of vanilla coding and onto something more productive. I understand the need for us to learn this and I actually enjoyed it, but I do think something more succinct will suit the things I am wanting to create.

Before I go and actually eat something, I'll mention my project.

It's quite simple. Just a SPA with data from a .json that I made with movie data. These particular movies are "trash" or movies we love to hate. Low ratings around the board, but man are they fun to watch. You can scroll horizontally through the movie images at the top and click to display their information. You can click to agree whether the movie is "Certified Trash" and the counter will keep score of all who have voted.

I also included a submission form where you can submit your own ~~movies~~ trash. It will show up in the scrolling bar of images at the top and be clicked to display its information as well. The page does not reload when a submission is made and the form resets itself after every submission (I am proud of the reset, okay? I know it's simple.)

And that's my first blog post on this journey that I'm nervous but ultimately excited for.

Thanks for reading.

-Sunny