Coding Bootcamp Week 4/13: Async, Data Fetching, and Promises
I promise this will be a quick read.
We have officially completed a month (4 weeks) in the course! Time definitely flew by, and I can’t believe there’s roughly two more months to go before graduation.
Monthly Review
The past month has been nothing short of amazing.
I started self-learning coding and development around May this year, and I might be repeating myself, but I learned an awful lot more this past month than I did from May til I started the course combined.
To be fair, I only dedicated 1–3 hours a day to coding when I was on my own, and I basically did not have a path. The past month, I have been coding and learning to code minimum 8 hours on weekdays. I take my well deserved breaks in the weekends just to avoid burn outs (as my developer friends warned me about).
It’s been really great. Apart from progressing with my logic and algorithm skills, my social anxiety is also improving. During the first week, turning my camera on or speaking to ask a question was a whole challenge in itself. Working with a stranger during pair programming, or even asking for help from a mentor through nchelp, could easily give me a huge anxiety attack.
Fortunately, I have started getting more and more comfortable with going on video, and asking questions and going on nchelp have become almost second nature to me. I believe getting comfortable with all this is immensely important if I want to be a good developer, because I recognise that effective communication is vital.
Revision Day
On Monday, we had a Revision Day. A whole full day in revisiting what we have learned so far, and doing a bunch of coding tasks, including recursion, Object-Oriented Programming, Closures, etc..
It went really smoothly for me and it was a good refresher before we headed on to the next lesson.
I enjoyed this day very much, that even after bootcamp hours, I went ahead and solved coding problems from the precourse that I wasn’t able to solve. Spoiler alert: I solved them! Very easily too!
What we Learned This Week
It hadn’t really ever crossed my mind the order of which JavaScript executes the code, which is synchronous. One line at a time. Until this week, when we were first introduced to asynchronous functions.
- Async
- Internet and Data Fetching
- Promises
Internet and Data Fetching
Before we really dived into async and promises, we first had to understand how the internet really works, and it’s freaking cool. I watched this video for supplementary learning, and it surprised me just how physical the internet really is.
After a lecture on how the internet works, we then learned how to fetch data using APIs. We started with NodeJS API, then Axios. Promises have made things easier and neater as well. I enjoyed this a lot especially during the tasks, when we had to fetch information on books using the command line.
We also did a task that involves rewriting a file using fs/promises. The task was called delete vip. Here we were supplied with a .txt file with names, and we had to create something in the command line that will delete and update the content of this .txt file. This was my favourite task.
Conclusion
And that wraps up the JS Fundamentals block of our course. Next week, we start with backend, and on Friday, we will meet the Careers Team. Who’s excited? Obviously me!
Northcoders Bootcamp Series
- Week 1: Back to Basics (Not Really)
- Week 2: JavaScript Fundamentals + Brain Soup
- Week 3: More JavaScript Fundamentals + Recursions and Object-Oriented Programming
- Week 4: Async, Data Fetching, and Promises ⬅ YOU ARE HERE.
- Week 5: First Week on Back-end
- Week 6: Second Week on Back-end
- Week 7: Final Week on Back-end
- Week 8: The DOM and ReactJS + Holiday Break!
- Week 9: New Year, New Tech
- Week 10: Building the Frontend and Why I Found it Hard
