I ended up getting a slight cold and it really drained all of my energy this past weekend. Despite the small setback, this week has been awesome! I felt like I was completely lost last week working with Knockout, but now Zak is back! We learned about an alternative to KnockoutJS this week, and that alternative is AngularJS. Angular has been so awesome to work with and is very powerful. I found it much more structured and less chaotic than Knockout. I would love to never work with knockout again but I know that won’t make me a very good developer. So, I really would like to go back and study it more.
The projects we have worked on this have been the most fun to build yet. I am starting to get the hang of JavaScript more and html and css is getting pretty easy. Working with Angular we built a budget calculator, Chipotle Locator, an interactive resume, and an API! We will be taking the API we built and will be building the front end over the weekend. So, technically… I am a full stack developer!! We also learned about an AMAZING package installer called Bower. It makes installing everything so easy. I highly recommend everyone check it out.
I am really glad we went back and created another API using Entity Framework this week and introduced AutoMapper. AutoMapper was really awesome to work with and made creating databases a lot easier. I felt like making the API this time was a lot easier than the first time we made one. All the extra tools we have learned since then have been game changers.
We had a MeetUp this week at Zeeto. There were a few lightning talks on JavaScript tools, Agile Development, and gave us a tour of their incredible office. You can learn more about what Zeeto does by clicking here. We also had 2 guest speakers this Friday. Clint Johnson, an IT technical recruiter at ManpowerGroup was our first speaker. Clint came in and talked about the job hunting process and what we should expect. He also gave great tips on resume building. Our second speaker was Bryan Hall. Bryan is the Co-founder and CTO at Email Copilot. His company works in the same space as Origin so it was awesome to get a chance to hear him talk and ask him questions. He gave us some solid advice on interviews and advice on what we should do as Jr. Devs to make us better and easier to work with. Having speakers come in every Friday has been so helpful.
It really does amaze me how far we have all come in 6 weeks. We are learning so many tools and they are getting sharper and sharper each time we use them. It is also unbelievable my time at Origin Code Academy is already halfway over. They say time flies when you are having fun, I can say with confidence that is true! I can not wait to see what the next 6 weeks brings.