This was by far the most challenging week of bootcamp that we've had yet. But I think it was also the week that has produced the most growth. The pair pseudocoding exercise that we did this week was a great at forcing us to vocalize how we would go about solving different aspects of the project and be able to listen and understand someone else's perspective and way to solve it as well.
Now that we're officially 25% through the program (which is unbelieveable, I feel like we still have just started), it's time to begin thinking about a couple of capstone project ideas and features for each one.
I'm ready to learn about React because of how it can fast-forward your ability to make your projects.
I can certainly see advantages to utilizing the Model-View-Controller Design Pattern because it establishes clear roles and responsibilities to sections of your code. Without these structures, everyones program takes more time to digest how it operates and this opens up more opportunities for error. Which is the biggest enemy of any programmer. I still have quite a bit to learn about using MVC, but I'm looking forward to trying to use it with React next week.
Good code has to be functional, readable, maintainable, and efficient. First of all good code has to achieve a solution to the problem it was trying to solve. If it doesn't work as intended or produces wrong results it cannot be considered good code. Good code also has to be readable and maintainable. It's important to use practices that are common throughout the industry so that whenever another developer or simply your future self needs to work on your code it is easy to understand by being able to read good documentation in the form of logical structural patters, standard formatting, and clear commenting. Lastly good code needs to be efficient. There are many ways to solve each problem and if you can do the same amount of work in less code it is typically better to utilize the method with less code. This leads to fewer opportunites for errors and more maintainable code as well.
Being a good developer is more than being a good programmer. Good developers need to excel in communication with clients, working on a team, problem solving, along with having all of the necessary technical knowledge and skills.
Programmers hate "WET" code. WET stands for many things: Write Every Time", Write Everything Twice, We Enjoy Typing or Waste Everyone's Time. Basically we hate repeating ourselves in our code. Instead we want to write "DRY" code. This stands for Don't Repeat Yourself. This principle serves two main purposes: more efficient code saves time and resources, but also repeated code is an additional source of possible errors.
It was very exciting to get started with the in-person portion of the bootcamp this week. Setting up the learning space in a way to maximize our capability to learn was very beneficial, but I think one drawback that each student faced was the tendency to compare each other's progress or starting point against each other. By the end of the week, through different exercises and the very impactful discussion led by Dr. Murphy, I think the entire cohort was able to lower our guard and fear of showing weakness which will give every one of us the ability to progess at a greater rate and become better programmers.
I'm looking forward to learn more about how to utilize JavaScript and JSON to bring data from external sources to make our websites more beneficial and serve a purpose besides displaying hard coded information. I'd also like to continue learning about how to better utilize Bootstrap to work with images. I have a basic understanding but that was the main area where I found myself falling back to using custom CSS to handle image formatting.
It's the final day of Prework! While it has felt like I've been drinking straight from a firehose up until now, I know that the intensity is about to jump up to another level. It was a huge benefit to have a small background in the different topics that we have been we learning about in Prework because of the Intro to Web Development class, but there were still new problems to solve with each and every topic. My biggest challenge was being able to debug and understand why JavaScript was not working as anticipated or understanding what different error codes mean. I overcame these obstacles through a myriad of different strategies that were discussed throughout the course thus far. Some problems required more reading and research, some just needed a slowdown to digest what the code says, and sometimes reaching out for help was the right answer. As I said in a previous post, the willingness of the group and instructors to help each other on any and all topics is very encouraging and promising for the rest of the bootcamp.
HTML, CSS, and JavaScript each provide important layers to both the user and the developer for any website. If a developer were to omit any one of these technologies from their website it would stand out as insufficient in the modern web environment. A website would have no content without HTML. It would be lifeless and boring without CSS. And JavaScript is needed to make websites come alive and do something besides present content. JavaScript allows developers to create animations, create programs that do a myriad number of actions, be able to call other servers to utilize external API's, manipulate data, and many, many other functions that are far beyond my novice understanding of JavaScript at this point.
So far, my blog uses a very few objects, but I do have a few examples: images, iframes, and anchors (links). I plan on moving my navigation bar behind a menu button object which will show/hide the site navigation.
I've learned and re-learned a lot of content this week. Since I already had a small base of knowledge about HTML and CSS from Awesome Inc's Into to Web Development course, I decided to approach the material as if I had not read them before and made thorough notes that could be used as a quick reference guide. I find that writing also helps me to retain information better, rather than just reading it.
The new concept for me this week has been pseudocoding. I can definitely see how pseudocoding is an invaluable tool for programming, but also one that takes a great deal of experience to improve your skill at it. Once I decided my topic for the pseudocode assignment, I began mapping out the different functions, objects, variables, and behaviors for how each of these parts would work together to achieve my desired outcome. The scope quickly ballooned far beyond what I had anticipated. My challenge then turned to working out how the different parts of the program would fit along the MoSCoW rubric. Some things were easy to mark as "Won't Do" or "Could Do" because they would be far too time consuming or complex to work out their behavior. Others were harder to know where exactly to assign. My markdown file ended up being much longer than I had anticipated at the start of the project, but as I re-evaluated my work I couldn't see how to remove or simplify any sections without leaving a big unexplained hole in the code. I'm sure that with more experience, this will become more apparent and easier.
Next week I'm excited to start adding JavaScript to our toolbelt and starting to turn the pseudocode into functional code so that we can begin to add some dynamics to our web pages and bring them up to par with what is expected in modern web sites.
The first week of bootcamp has been full of ups and downs, aha moments and bouts of confusion.
I've been very grateful for how responsive and eager everyone is to jump in to tackle problems in the help channel. The fact that we're all brand new to this field but still working through problems together and actually finding solutions is very encouraging. My first major aha moment was when I was able to understand the proper order of operations and terminology of Git. My inital understanding of the process was that the pull request started your local branch, then you would make your changes on your local server, commit the changes locally, and push your commits back up to the remote server. After reviewing the documentation and exercises again I now see how these commands truly work:
$git branch : will
open a new branch in your repo
$git fetch
: will scan a remote server for differences between your local
repo and the
remote repo$git pull
: will actually download the commits that you do not have in your
local repo
$git merge
: will combine your changes into the master both locally and
remotelyNext week I'm looking forward to knocking off the rust and continuing to build on the knowledge of HTML and CSS that I learned in the Intro to Web Developement class this past spring.