FSA: Week 2 & 3

May 10, 2015

Time has really been hard to keep track of these past few weeks. Monday quickly turns to Friday and the days don’t ever quite feel like they end each night. Not a bad thing per se, only an observation.

Week 2

Week 2 was jam packed with Game of Life, Node.js, Express.js, and SQL. Game of Life was mind bending yet philosophically pleasant. Node and Express are very cool technologies. I now know how to build a web server using Node, create routes in Express, and how GET/POST requests and responses work.

Week 3

MongoDB! After struggling with SQL and implementing a SQL-like functionality with functional JavaScript for a few days, I was ready to dive into another means of storing data. MongoDB is schema-less which makes it difficult to create structure right out of the box. Enter Mongoose. Mongoose is an ODM, object document mapper, for MongoDB. Mongoose enables us to create schemas for MongoDB collections (tables in SQL). Schemas act very much like classes/constructor functions in JS. Creating a document in Mongo (a cell in a SQL table), is as simple as calling new myCollectionSchema and voila, you’ve got a new object (document).

We learned Mongo on a Wednesday. An assessment on Express and MongoDB would take place the very next day. I took the full three hours to complete the assessment. I managed to pass most of the test cases but it wasn’t easy. It was a valuable learning experience. During the assessment, I could feel myself finally putting the pieces of the JS full-stack puzzle together. Things I was confused about earlier that day suddenly made sense. I guess that’s why it’s important to be thrown in the deep-end sometimes. Amazing things can happen in times of stress. As long as you keep your cool and work hard, you’d be surprised how much you can accomplish.

Health Update

Hundred push up and two hundred squat challenge has been going well. I make sure to do one of the exercise routines every morning Monday - Saturday. I’ve been meditating in the campus group meditation sessions called Mindfulstack for 15 minutes on most mornings. Can’t say I feel transformed yet, but only time will tell! So far, health has been holding up fairly well. Could do with a bit more sleep, but whaddya gon’ do.

One last thing before I sign off. Friday we had a hackathon on campus, where the juniors and seniors banded together to create something using Tessels, a microcontroller that runs on Node.js. I was looking forward to making something awesome in the beginning. Sadly, we had issues with the Tessel hardware, wifi in particular (something Tessel 1 is infamously known) and our team just checked out. Working with hardware was really cool though and it’s something I’d definitely like to revisit in the future. Maybe I’ll finally do something with my Arduino Uno or pick up a Raspberry Pi while it’s on sale now.. The Tessel 2 will be out this summer as well, so that’s another option.

Anyway, tomorrow begins week four of my Fullstack journey. I think we’re going to be learning about front-end technologies which I am looking forward to, though I don’t think a lot of my classmates are going to be. Based on what I’ve heard, a lot of them aren’t in to the front-end like I am. But I suppose we’ll see! More to come..