DEV Community: Jeff McHale

Weekly Round-up #6

Jeff McHale — Sat, 22 Jun 2019 01:24:17 +0000

Welcome to the 6th entry of this series!

On vacation with the family!!! Which means not as much coding/learning happening for the things that I have been commissioned by my wife to create for her. hopefully she forgives me if I'm late. :-D I am taking advantage of some quiet time to write this post.

This weeks happenings:

Saturday - Got to enjoy spending time with familyand friends after being gone for 2 weeks on military shenanigans.
Sunday - Father's Day! Enjoyed a good church service, and then snuggled on the couch with my girls for most of the afternoon. Couldn't have asked for a better way to spend my day.
Monday thru Wednesday - Worked my regular job and spent time getting ready for vacation. On Tuesday I started refreshing myself on the inner workings of flexbox with a course that was recommended by a friend, and mentor on the Let's Code discord server.

Flexbox Zombies is just AWESOME! The main objective is to learn flexbox, prograssively, while surviving zombie attacks. You should seriously check it out. It's probably my new favorite course for learning flexbox.

Thursday - Headed to Tybee Island, GA for vacation! Gonna be so much fun! Worked through more of that flexbox course, which is pretty awesome.
Friday - Here we are at the end of another Weekly Round-up. I'm still enjoying my vacation, and I'm really starting to nail down flexbox.

Thanks for taking time out of your day to follow along with my journey. I know this Round-up is more like an update on my life in general, which is why I appreciate your views even more. I'm looking forward to getting back into coding more often. Gotta get these apps off the paper and into the code.

-Jeff

Special thanks to kayak from Let's Code for recommending the awesome course that has become my new favorite flexbox course.

I wanna give a shout-out to the awesome people that have been great to chat with, and get advice from, on a relatively new discord server. If you're looking for a community that's supportive, and still fairly new, check out the HTML All the Things discord. We look forward to seeing you there.

Weekly Round-up #5

Jeff McHale — Fri, 14 Jun 2019 21:12:03 +0000

#5 PEEPS!

This week has been kind of a blur. I forgot to jot down little notes of the things I accomplished, but I'm going to try my best to remember what all I accomplished this week.

Let's get this party started, shall we?

Saturday & Sunday - Worked through, and finished my JavaScript Crash Course by Brad Traversy. I felt it was a well laid out course to get your feet wet with JS, especially if you're new to world of coding. Brad has a great way of explaining things. I recommend giving it a looksy if you're vaguely interested in coding. Good stuff.
Monday - I honestly can not remember what I did on Monday. I will work on taking better notes. I'm sorry for the disappointment.
Tuesday - I started watching Wes Bos' first video in his JavaScript30 course. Then I got distracted by thinking about side projects. I might start a blog about side projects, if I ever get around to starting any of them. Lol.
Wednesday - My wife has asked me to build her an inventory app for her business. This is going to take me WAY outside of my current skill set, and comfort zone. I did some research via the awesome folks on my discord servers and came away feeling confident I could learn enough to make an M.V.P. for her in about 1 month. I will be using MongoDB, node.js, express.js, mongoose, and I'm debating using Bootstrap4 or Bulma CSS for the layout. I did some digging around and found some MongoDB tutorials. I plan to sart those on Thursday.
Thursday - I started one of the MongoDB tutorials that I had found on Wednesday. MongoDB in 30 Minutes by Brad Traversy has been pretty good so far. He doesn't go too deep. Brad keeps everything in the command line for this tutorial. It's designed to ease you into MongoDB. Brad has so many great FREE courses on his youtube channel, Traversy Media.
Friday - So, here we are, the Friday of the 5th entry of my Weekly Round-up series. Today I finished up the MongoDB in 30 Minutes tutorial. I also made it back home from my 12ish days in NY for some military stuffs. Tomorrow I get to see my wife and kids in person, instead of via video calls on FB messenger. I can't wait!!!!

This Weekly Round-up series has been a really awesome way for me to share my journey with the world. Even though that world is quite small right now. Lol. I'm excited to see what the journey is going to continue to become. Thank you to the ones that have been following me as I've started this journey. And a big thank you to those that have been there to help me when I hit some speed bumps along the way.

If anyone has any feedback on how I could make these posts better, in any way, please comment below or find me on twitter at @jeff_mchale1.

Thanks so much for taking the time to read about my coding journey.

-Jeff

Weekly Round-up #4

Jeff McHale — Sun, 09 Jun 2019 19:19:08 +0000

Here we go again!

Sorry for the late post everyone. This has been one hectic week. Quite the roller-coaster ride. I am a member of the USAF Reserve, and have been on a military exercise. Not a lot of coding has been accomplished. I will walk you through the past week up until Friday, which is how my regular Round-ups go.

Let's got this round-up going! Lol.

Saturday & Sunday - Didn't accomplish any coding last weekend. I focused on time with my family while I waited for the green light to head to upstate NY for a military exercise.
Monday - Finally got the green light. As I was headed to the airport, I learned that my little brother was being admitted tot he hospital after complaining about immobilizing stomach pains. He appendicitis, and the doctors said it needed to be removed. I got notified he was going into surgery right as I boarded the plane. My phone had a few messages saying everything had gone good in the surgery and my brother was in recovery.
Tuesday - Did some military stuff. Started taking notes on JS. Started diving through some JS tutorials in hopes of finding one that click. Started following Flavio Copes as he starts building an app from idea to production. Should be fun to watch how someone goes through these different stages.
Wednesday - No coding accomplished today. Thanks to how this exercise has gone my sleep schedule is shot. I did enjoy spedning time with my team at supper though. They're pretty good company.
Thursday - Sleep schedule is still in the toilet. No coding today either. Went to a pretty neat place in the mall near where we're staying. Great food, good drinks and random trivia.
Friday - Found a JavaScript Crash Course for Beginners on YouTube that seems to have clicked. Going to get through it before diving into Wes Bos' JavaScript 30 course.

That's it for the week. I do plan to continue, and finish, The Complete JavaScript Course 2019 by Jonas Schmedtmann. I was just trying to find different teaching styles for the basics. I really like The Complete JavaScript Course 2019 for the different projects Jonas runs you through. He has a basic budget app that I feel would give me some good groundwork for the budget app I would like to build for my portfolio.

I hope everyone has had a great week. Thank you for following along with me. Looking forward to giving everyone more content in the future.

-Jeff

Weekly Round-up #3

Jeff McHale — Sat, 01 Jun 2019 02:41:46 +0000

Welcome back to another Weekly Round-up. This one isn't going to quite as long as last weeks. It's been pretty crazy around here since I'm getting ready to head to New York for some fun military training.

This week has been more family time than coding time, but I will give you guys, and gals, some insights into the coding I did accomplish.

This week in review:

Saturday - Played around with netlify. It's a great platform with a pretty impressive deployment speed. Just connect to your repo from your prefered repo site. Mine is github. Got some great feedback on the site, so I started tweaking the aesthetics. I also performed some code refactoring, which inevitably broke something. The menu decided it didn't like the refactor, and refused to work. Thanks to my buddy Sean for helping me find the problem in a pair debugging session. I created another branch via git, and we worked from that branch. Turns out I had a space where a space didn't belong. He also helped me upgrade the jQuery for the drop-down menu. He also explained where that code should go, and why. Sean has been very helpful in the short time we've known each other. Go check out his tutorials on YouTube
Sunday - Enjoyed time with my family. We had lunch with my wife's parents, and grandparents. I worked on merging the branch Sean and I worked on to fix the issues the refactor had caused via git. Pushed the changes to github, and then checked the deployed version to make sure the changes had been applied. I'm finally feeling confident with git, as well as flexbox.
Monday - Spent time with my parents and grilled out for Memorial Day. Someone suggested using a textured background for my site, and sent me here. I played around with the different textures until I found one I liked, and added it to my site. Got some positive feedback on the changes I've been pushing, as well as some constructive criticism on some of the little details. Now that it's the little things I'm getting comments on I feel confident in moving on to the next project.
Tuesday - I did not move on to the next project on my list. I enjoyed teaching the second of nine lessons in the financial peace course my wife and I are coordinating. Got home after the lesson and had to pack up for my whirlwind trip down to stay with a friend that lives close to where I have an interview on Thursday. I'm excited, and nervous, about my interview. This will be my first tech job. It's an IT Customer Support/Help Desk job.
Wednesday - No coding today. Spent a good bit of my evening driving down to my friends house, and spent time with them before heading to bed so I can be well rested for that interview tomorrow.
Thursday - Went to that interview. Unfortunately I did not get the job. There will be other opportunities though. After I got home I signed up for, and started, Flatiron School's FREE Coding Bootcamp Prep Course. Gotta love free!
Friday - I jumped into more JavaScript on Scrimba's Intro to Javascript course. Attempted to dive in to npm, which I decided I wasn't ready for yet. Looked at Bulma, which seems like a pretty cool framework, but is also something I'm not ready to dive into just yet. I decided to jump into Wes Bos' JavaScript30 course which seems like a lot of fun, and full of real world examples.

Thanks for stopping by and taking the time to follow up on my week. Your time is appreciated.

If I get the chance to sling some code this week I hope to get deeper into JavaScript, get a few of the JavaScript30 exercises accomplished, and maybe even watch some Bulma and npm tutorials.

Don't forget to check out the links in the post. They lead to some cool things, as well as things that you probably already know about if you're further along than I am in your coding journey.

Thanks again for joining me on my journey. See you again next week.

-Jeff

Weekly Round-up #2

Jeff McHale — Fri, 24 May 2019 23:44:33 +0000

Hello!

Welcome to my Weekly Round-up #2! In keeping with the theme, this will be what I accomplished in the past week in my coding journey.

In a nutshell, flexbox is starting to make sense. Woot woot! I've been putting in a lot of practice and tutorial watching. This week I stumbled across a screencast tutorial site, Scrimba.

The really cool thing about Scrimba, if you haven't already heard about it, is the fact that you can mess with the code right there inside the tutorial. Simply pause the video and take over on the code editing. When you're ready to resume the tutorial just click play and you're back to watching the instructor.

Now, it's time for what you're all waiting for, how my week went.

Saturday - I went through a few more flexbox tutorials with Wes Boss, and then decided to get started on my responsive website project.
Sunday - Didn't code today. I went and spent some time with my grandpa since it was his birthday. Later I made sure the technology I was going to use for the Financial Peace University course I'm coordinating functioned properly.
Monday - Learned some cool stuff today. I worked on a mobile friendly flexbox navigation menu. Figured out how to use media queries for mobile responsiveness. I also utilized jQuery to open/close the menu.
Tuesday - Finally got the bugs in the menu worked out. Worked on adding content to the website. I figured out how to embed a Google calendar, which was super awesome(albeit rather simple)! Submitted the website for review.
Wednesday - Took the night off from coding to spend time with my girls.
Thursday - Today is the day I discovered Scrimba. I worked through the flexbox tutorial they have. During that tutorial learned a more precise way to control child elements with .container > div:nth-child(1). Flexbox is starting to click as of today.
Friday - Tonight I am continuing my blogging. I'm also planning to start learning JavaScript.

Thanks for taking the time to read this. It's really appreciated. I know I've got a long way to go, but I'll get there. It's like eating an elephant, just gotta do it one "byte" at a time. (Shout out to Sean over at RabbitWerks JavaScript for that one.)

-Jeff

Let's Code < Don't forget to check out this awesome Discord server.

Scrimba < Head on over for some great tutorials.

Wes Bos < And check out all the cool stuff this guy has going on.

RabbitWerks JavaScript < If you're trying to find a framework, and might be interested in Vue.js, go check out Sean's Vue.js tutorials.

Weekly Round-up #1

Jeff McHale — Fri, 17 May 2019 23:35:51 +0000

Good Evening!

Welcome to my first blog post ever. I am starting a "Weekly Round-up" with some people on the Let's Code Discord server. A few people on that server recommended dev.to as a good place to start blogging, so here I am.

This week, the main thing I focused on was figuring out flexbox. Flexbox is hard. I have figured out that it makes life easier, especially in today's technology world with all of the different screen sizes. Figuring out how to USE flexbox, however, is not that easy.

Here is a breakdown of how my week went:

Monday night I went back over some "What the Flexbox!?" videos by Wes Bos. Those videos are very helpful when you are trying to get the basics down.
Tuesday was packed with family things. No coding, but fun was had by all.
Wednesday night was packed full of information. I participated in some pair programming with someone that I met another Discord server. He took me on a deep dive of flexbox with some coding examples. He also used his own web app, Flexbox PLayground, that provides a visual of the different properties work. I learned so much from that.
Thursday night we celebrated my 4 year graduating from her preschool class.
Tonight (Friday), I am blogging for the first time.

Follow along as I continue to learn, and grow, as a coder. My goal is to become a Fullstack Web Developer. I know I have a long journey ahead of me.

Thank you for taking the time to read this.

-Jeff

Let's Code < Awesome community for beginners.

What the Flexbox!? < Great resource by Wes Bos

Flexbox Playground < Check it out!