Week 13

It has been an incredible journey. The past 12 weeks at Hack Reactor (formerly MakerSquare) have been the most challenging, the most tiring, and the most satisfying weeks of my life.

I enjoyed these past 12 weeks very much. I started this journey as a decent web developer and now feel like a highly capable software developer. The first six weeks, we had two day sprints on different topics ranging from front-end to back-end. I learned how to master HTML/CSS, use many different JavaScript frameworks (React/Angular/Mithril), databases (mongoDB/SQL), test driven development principles (Jasmine/Mocha/Karma), task runners (Grunt/Gulp), and amazing back end technologies (Node/Express). The most important skill I gained was the the ability to read the documentation for a certain technology and implement it into a project, which became very useful the last six weeks where I was assigned to a team and we were tasked to develop full stack applications of our choice.

My first project was a Chess Game built in React as the front-end, Node on the back-end, PostgreSQL for the database, and Socket.IO for realtime communication between users.

The second project we created an interactive movie database application which allows users to search for actors and get back a list of movies they co-starred in. We also allowed for users to view the movie’s rating, stream it on Netflix or iTunes, or watch the trailer. This was built using the MEAN stack and the TMDB API.

The final project and the project which really was the most satisfying to build was a Shift Swapping app for co-workers. You log-in through Facebook, set a home-store, the app grabs your locoation, and you are able to see all the nearby stores and any shifts that are up for grabs. You can request a shift or accept/reject other users’ requesting your shift. We used the MEAN stack here as well as the Ionic Framework to create it as a native mobile app for iOS and Android.