From Craft to Code

As my graduation date slowly approaches I now have the freedom and the tools to start building my own applications from scratch. I came into this program three months ago knowing I wanted to build web pages for my photography and handmade crafts. Now I finally can! Even better, I can create a portfolio app that showcases all of these new skills as well as my personal projects. For the last couple of days I went ahead and dived into Handmade by Vi - a responsive website that dynamically displays available products and service using React, HTML, and CSS. My first steps were to sketch out a rough idea of how the application was going to look. I picked three colors, created a layout for each page, and loosely linked how the navigation was going to render. In a few hours I was able to develop the barebones and functionality of my site. I chose some pretty simple and clean designs,  added a media query to handle mobile view, and implemented a few dynamic routes for my 'shop' page...

Last week I learned about Mongo - a NoSQL data structure. This week we've covered the opposite. SQL is much more structured and rigid but does allow for an 'easier to organize' approach. More time and thought has to be put into a table's creation. Extra data can be added after the fact but it is easiest to have all of the data you know you want to collect ahead of time. Basically you're turning your raw data into a spreadsheet. That is, SQL is great for data that already exists and needs to be organized.  Unfortunately most of this happens behind the scenes and is executed in the command line. That means I really don't have any images to share. Even when turning in my assignment I had to export my raw data into a file and upload that with a README file explaining what I did to achieve that success.  Tables are just organized data and can be joined to filter out needed information. Those queries look something like this:  SELECT title FROM todos WHERE com...

Last week we covered databases! Super exciting, right? It only makes sense, though, that the majority of back end development would be storing, accessing, and updating data. There are quite a few tools available for Node.js and the ones we covered are Mongo and Mongoose. Mongo or MongoDB itself stores data flexibly. Why does that flexibility matter? It is perfect for sets of data that are incomplete. If I had a list of contacts I wanted to store but I didn't have everyone's emails it wouldn't be a big deal - those email addresses would just be empty. Mongo stores the data and Mongoose is a tool that accesses it for you. This is the secure way to retrieve data and validate it rather than having potentially sensitive information stored right in the code for anyone to see. Mongoose is pretty straightforward to use and I implemented it into my robots database (that thing again!). In a nutshell, I was able to swap out the database I had stored in a file and put it into Mongo o...

If you haven't heart already - The Iron Yard went public on Thursday that it's locations will be shutting down after all current students complete their courses. This, naturally, impacted a lot of us emotionally but I know, for myself, that I'm still in this to learn as much as possible. I'm incredibly lucky that the staff here has built the Raleigh campus together and they also will stick this out until the end. Outside of that, this week was the final week of front end development before we move on to back end. Thursday and Friday we broke into groups and were inspired to begin our Hackathon project. Our theme was 'Mashup' so my team decided to do an arcade style page with multiple mini games. I, specifically, offered to do a Choose Your Own Adventure Game. I chose to write a 'tour' of Iron Yard's Raleigh campus. After a greeting and an input field for your name, you enter each room as you choose. The tricky part was to make sure that once a room...

Never have I ever put so much thought into how a calculator works. Our weekly assignment, due this upcoming Friday, is to create a static webpage that will display a green calculator that not just looks pretty but functions correctly. The looking pretty is HTML and CSS which we covered a grand total of two weeks ago and I'm already feeling rusty on. The functionality is all JavaScript. I seriously can't believe that in three weeks I'm already familiar with and using (kind of awkwardly) these three languages. In about five hours time I accomplished all of the above. I have green buttons that when pushed are displayed in the empty field at the top of the page as well as can mathematically work (as long as the operation is simple and done one step at a time). For now my GitHub link is  https://github.com/victoriarainc/week-03-project  but I will update later this week with the actual page so you can interact with my code! Yay progress! All in all I'm super proud but...

After one week of diving straight into hands on coding my brain is fried but my spirits are high! I know there is so much work ahead of me but knowing that I'm capable of learning at this pace is really encouraging. Just five short days ago I didn't know anything about command line, knew conceptually how to push project files to git but never actually had confidently, and certainly hadn't ever created a mock up of a web page from scratch with HTML and CSS. Along the way I've discovered there were more road blocks in my way than I realized. I haven't ever been familiar with Mac interface so just looking for my files and switching between windows took way longer than it should be. I'm not super in tune with my learning style either so it has been difficult to sort between what I didn't understand and what I couldn't remember. Any mistake I've made along the way I doubted my understanding of the material instead of assuming I spelled something wrong o...