Blog Index

This past Tuesday evening, the team project that has enveloped all of my free time has launched. Wanderful is a random travel destination site built utilizing the MERN stack. Users are able to visit the site and click a button on the landing page to discover details about a randomized destination stored in our database. Here they can get a quick blurb about the location, and information about various points of interest including: hotels, restaurants, entertainment, and the ability to check flights to get to the location. If a user creates an account with the site they are able to save their favorite destinations and POIs where they can easily view them on their favorites dashboard. If a user desires to get any more information about a give…

After completing the Front End Certificate on Free Code Camp, it was on to the back end, which has proven to be an interesting challenge. I have been working on using NodeJS and Express to build out routing and basic APIs. I worked through the learning courses on Free Code Camp which were a bit harder to grasp and less informative than their other lessons, but I was able to work through them. I created the first couple API microservices: a timestamp microservice and a request header parser microservice. I started working through my url shortener project and have about half of it completed. It can receive a new url, tests that it is a valid url, and then creates a short ID which is saved to the database with the original url. I still need to…

It has been an exciting couple of weeks since my last 100 Days of Code checkin. During that time I completed the last two projects in my front-end certification: a Tic Tac Toe game, and a Simon Game. I built both using the React framework, and feel quite comfortable with the framework after completing these projects. After completing my Simon game this past Saturday I was able to claim my front-end development certificate on the 150th day since I started my development journey and the 20th day of this challenge. It's fun looking back just two weeks ago where I thought I would get done before October 1st, and I finished a month before then. I still had it in my mind that the last two projects were going to be of a difficulty that I had never…

On Saturday night, the 150th day since I started my coding journey on Free Code Camp, I completed the Simon Game project and claimed my front end development certificate. It's been an amazing start to my journey as a developer, and I'm amazed at how much I have learned in such a relatively short period of time. You can find the live version here and the code on Github The Simon Game project brought some unique challenges that were really helpful for my growth. I chose to develop the UI on this project first, and fully built all of the React components with basic styling before adding any functionality. Sorting out how to make the color play buttons display properly with selective border radii, and then how to position the game controls took…

Another project is in the books. I completed the Tic Tac Toe game using the React framework with 5 days and around 12 hours of active development. You can check out the live version here and the code on Github. By far the most complex part of this project was creating the computer AI component. The idea of it had me in analysis paralysis for a day or two. This project really emphasized the need to break down the problems into bite sized, even seemingly insignificant pieces. For a while, I struggled with even starting on the logic for the computer player. It is so easy to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the problem, that it seems like it works by magic and is unattainable. This is exactly what happened to me as I was struggling to…