Coding Bootcamp Week 1: Command line, Git & GitHub, JavaScript Basics & Introduction to HTML/CSS

Introduction week

Photo by Florian Olivo on Unsplash

Welcome to my 13-week journey of becoming a software developer. I started my bootcamp on Monday, January 9th, and I’m sharing my experiences and insights so it can help other emerging developers.

One of the things that I struggled with when learning to code on my own was the lack of structure and application of knowledge.

What I did before starting the bootcamp

Python, Machine Learning, Command line, CS50x, JavaScript, HTML & CSS.

And lots practice on leetcode and codewars!

I use iTerm and Visual Studio Code and I set up my development environment by downloading:

• Brew
• Node via NVM
• PSQL
• zsh
• oh-my-zsh

I would suggest doing the freecodecamp JS course as majority of the first week was a recap of its content.

Photo by Roman Synkevych 🇺🇦 on Unsplash

Git and GitHub

Learnt about Git and GitHub and practiced the following:

• Started a project locally on my computer then moved it to Github
• Created a repository(repo) on Github/ forked a repo and cloned it on my device
• Practiced push and pull requests

I also found this series offered a clear and concise explanation of the concepts and provided hands-on exercises to practice the skills.

JavaScript Basics

Part 1 — Data, variables, expressions, conditional logic, iteration and functions.

Downloaded Node and ran JS files by writing ‘node filename.js’ in the terminal window to test my code.

Part 2 — Objects and array, and understanding errors.

Part 3 — Higher order array methods, regular expression and export & require.

We also looked at what happens under the hood in a Call Stack which is explained well here.

Use MDN documentation to peruse through it all.

Intro to HTML and CSS

Photo by Jackson Sophat on Unsplash

I found the course on codecademy useful for HTML/CSS but the fcc course is good too.

They asked us to make a simple webpage on anything and here’s what I made, please bear in mind the page is not responsive so will look different on different screen size> https://astounding-kitsune-ea803b.netlify.app/

You can use Netlify or Github pages to deploy your static webpages.

Here are some additional links for the week

• Learn Git
• Command-Line
• JS explanations
• DevDocs
• Regex pattern matcher
• VSCode shortcuts

Emotional Check-In 🌊

During the past week, I encountered difficulty in articulating even the most simplest of concepts such as a for loop. This was due to my reliance on my finger’s muscle memory and a lack of prior experience in verbalizing code.

This has brought to light the disconnection between my cognitive ability to solve problems and my ability to express code verbally, a gap that I hope I can bridge through practice and improvement.

And with all the upcoming pair programming that is on the horizon, communicating code should hopefully improve with time and practice.

Overall, the first week served as a recap of the basics and helped to solidify my understanding of some fundamental concepts.

Leap through time

• Week 1 👀
• Week 2: Node.js, NPM, Test Driven Development, Pair Programming & Closure
• Week 3: Recursion, Object Oriented Programming, Data Structures — Stacks & Queues
• Week 4: Review day, Asynchronous Callbacks, Internet & Promises
• Week 5: HTTP, Express, Model-View-Controller (MVC) Pattern & SQL
• Week 6: Node Postgres, Supertest & Error Handling with Express
• Week 7: Backend Project, Async Await & CICD
• Week 8: DOM, React- Components, State & Hooks
• Week 9: API Calls, React — Router, Context & Optimistic Rendering
• Week 10: Frontend Project, Error Handling, Custom Hooks & Class-Based Components