Day 36/37 — Creating APIs
We’ve hit a wall. Most of us know what our focus will be and for those not doing backend this week is the struggle bus. Its a matter of pride at this point to complete any daily/weekly projects that keep them going.
As for me, it’s a struggle knowing what I can/will be doing and still being limited to what tools I have now.
Oh cool spend an hour creating all the folders, associations, tables, etc. just to realize that next week it will not be used again (maybe). Thus we’ve all sort of hit a wall in our education.
We all have stuff to get caught up on and I believe this week we’ll get a couple of days to do that. Honestly I think we were all hoping to get that time starting now. Instead it’s create APIs.
This is incredibly important. It will be something that I will do going forward. But man it’s brutal.
Part of the brutality is what educational materials we were actually given to start with. To call them insufficient would be extremely polite. Fortunately through a Google search I actually got a lot more information about creating RESTful API’s using Node/Express. Not enough to do a giant chunk of our daily activity but enough to get me started.
If there would be one critique of the program it would be that there’s a distinct disconnect between the lecture/assigned reading and the daily activity that we use.
Our actual daily assignment is to create an API for a vending machine that deals with total amount, item quantity, purchase dates, etc. I’m close but really far away on several of the routes. I think at this point it’s just a matter of refocusing on the work to get back into the mentality after a long break.
Struggles: At this exact moment, concentrating on the work at hand. Overall the struggle I’m dealing with is figuring out how to handle a single purchase within the API. It needs to hit the total amount present, have a deduction in total, have a deduction in quantity, and push our a purchase date.
Understood: Associations. I actually understand this concept within the database structure.
Looking forward to: Not spending so much time setting up a database and getting right into the code.