In my last blog post, I mentioned it being the hardest week yet. Well, this week surpassed that 10 fold. I really feel lost currently but I am excited to say that we won’t be learning any more new languages. This gives me a chance to go back and read over everything and study it more.
We started learning front end this week. We took a few older projects and built a front end for them. I really felt like I struggled with the new material because I knew nothing about JavaScript, CSS, and HTML before this week. We moved on from C# and started working with the above tools. Right when I felt like I was understanding the C# I get thrown a curve ball. It hasn’t been all too bad though. Being thrown into the deep end teaches you how to swim, or sink, if you just give up. This is the first time I felt like I was getting completely left behind/lost. Instead of stopping, I’ve been reading, watching videos, and doing tutorials online to understand JavaScript and HTML. I am struggling still with time management now that I have to learn these new tools and still try and get all my projects done for class. There just isn’t enough time in the day.
A really fun project we worked on this week was our “Movie Nerd” application. We used knockout.js and bootstrap to create a responsive web page that scales to different size screens. We called a movie database API that returned information on whatever movie the user input. This project was my first time working with JavaScript and my first time with knockout.js and bootstrap. Both of those tools were extremely useful and interesting to learn but also took a lot of my time. I had to read up on all the documentation, watch videos, and do the tutorials on their site to try and understand what I was doing.
Another project that we worked on this week was our BigBank API and making it a full stack application. We were to build the front end and use knockout.js and bootstrap again. This has been by far the most difficult task to date in the class. I’ve been coding away for the past 3 days non-stop and still have yet to get the project finished. Whenever you think you get close to being finished you find out you are nowhere close. There is always something to add or fix and it seems to be never ending. It is encouraging that I am only a month into learning this and have been able to complete most all of my projects.
Thursday night we had a MeetUp at the Evo Nexus building and wow what a turn out! Ever seat in the place had a body in it. We went over some JavaScript and learned what it does. We checked out a few awesome websites from the 90’s that had no/very little JavaScript. Needless to say, that was a blast from the past! It is really incredible how far the web has come from its beginning stages. We also had a guest speaker, Nick Head, he is the Director of Software Development at HireAHelper.com, come and speak to us. He gave us some valuable information for Jr Devs on hiring, tools they use, and some great sources like blogs and podcasts. I love being able to have access to all these Developers and CTO’s every week.
That’s enough blogging for now. I have to wipe the tears from my eyes and jump back into the gauntlet! Time to get in the zone and bust out some code! Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend. Check back in next week as always.
