KDS Dream Tech

Week 9 of Bootcamp

Portfolio Wormhole

By Keisha Shepherd

Written 12/16/2019

This week in class we learned Node.js and how to run things in the terminal. We can create and get node packages using NPM. We also learned more about ES-6, Axios, promises, and async functions. The ES-6 syntax, promises, and async functions lessons I really needed a lot earlier, because I ran into cases where I needed to use them a lot earlier on in the course. I also had a lot of trouble with them, and they were so quickly explained in class I was floored. I can’t believe each of the lessons were probably less than 10 minutes, then we would do the student activity for it.

Saturday’s lesson included object-oriented programming. I have read a few books on it and really would like some structured instruction on it but they didn’t get into any details on the inheritance, encapsulation, two other things. Duck types weren’t mentioned at all. There was a slide without any definitions or examples of what inheritance or other things mean. So the slides still are pretty useless.

The way the course was taught was just asking us what we knew, agreeing, then giving a short re-explanation and moving on. So I already know, I’m going to spend even more time outside of class trying to learn these concepts from free resources. I think I’ll also go to the library and get another book on some of the topics coming up. The last books I got from the library, are really filling in the holes with the instruction.

In one of my previous blogs, I mentioned they were only using global variables. This week they taught us lets and constants and said to only use those from now on… That was pretty much it. My tutor doesn’t see a problem with global variables so I’m on the fence about what to do.

My favorite takeaways from this week are:

  1. Tutoring Reinforces Learning
    2. Whether it’s me doing the tutoring or someone else tutoring me. It helps a lot to explain things to others. This week I met with classmates before and after class and had Friday night study group to work on the node homework. I have gotten the basics down pretty well after doing it three or four times. And after getting help from Jono and Donald, I have figured out how to reduce my code by hundreds of lines.
  2. Additional Resources are Amazing
    3. For the portfolio homework and coding challenge, I met with my tutor, a coworker, and my cousin that interned at Google for advice. They were all really good resources and helped me to make the website better. I was able to improve contrast on the page and add the bootstrap navbar toggle button based on their advice. I don’t know how it will do with the competition, but I hope I do well.
What’s gone awry? Well, this had me wondering about from previous lessons learned so I went back through my blogs and found some things to still be true.
  1. Finish Work Early, Hmph
    2. This week I didn’t follow my own advice. I ended up trying to start things early but they ended up kind of all piling up. So I have the portfolio due Friday, the competition portfolio due yesterday, and the node homework due Thursday. If I follow my own advice, the node homework should be done before class on Tuesday. But finding time to do all three has been difficult. I’ve been staying up late to about 3 am most days trying to get things in on time.
  2. Time Still is Everything
    3. Trying to be productive 100% of the time is nearly impossible. But I’m trying to make the best use of my time. I know now that a blog takes about an hour to write. But how long will it to get it right on the portfolio? That’s the real challenge. A lot of little things to do in the assignments just take a lot longer to get right than I would like. But the nice thing is that I don’t realize the time has gone by because I really enjoy working on the assignments.
  3. Background-Color: I Can’t Live Without it!
    4. When it comes to ensuring my website is media query friendly, the background color really helps me to see what my page looks like cell-phone, tablet, and desktop views.
  4. I STILL GOOGLE EVERYTHING
    5. It just has the answers I need. Especially when it comes to CSS.
  5. Shortcuts: Gotta Love Them
    6. I take them for granted because I know a few by heart, but I would still like to know more. Especially how to delete a line in VS Code, in VIM it’s ‘dd’ but it just wasn’t easy to remember in VS Code.
  6. Planning and Psedocoding definitely save time.
    7. Sticking to the plan is my problem. Sometimes I have too many contradicting plans which makes it difficult to move forward. For example, for my portfolio I originally wanted the front page to be a coloring book that someone can click a color and fill in the shapes. That was a challenge because I need to make an SVG maybe… My next idea was to use voice response and change the background color of the page. Even though I watched over 2 hours of youtube on Inkscape and SVG, I needed to just use what I know. I couldn’t get my design to export the HTML and I couldn’t figure out how to group the shapes so that I could fill them in.
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