aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-05-04

Learnings

• I'm happy to say that I am now proficient in JavaScript and React! In the last month, I've learned about React framework and how it can be used in frontend development. Going back to the mini capstone api that I had built the backend for using Ruby on Rails, I created a frontend for it using React. To call on the backend, I implemented axios in the Content component for my CRUD actions. I also implemented the useState and useEffect tools within React to display my store index, set up a show page within a modal, set up user create/login and added JWT authentication that would persist through each page.
• I spent a day learning SQL and how to query properly. While I was able to understand the basics, I've added a link below to a study guide I can use for future practice.
• Now that I feel comfortable using JS and know how to implement third party APIs into both frontend and backend, I can move forward with parsing the

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-03-28

Learnings

• Since my last update, we've finished covering both frontend and backend using Ruby and I can now successfully create a fullstack Rails app! We split into teams last week and my group created a mock version of AirBnB. We practiced pulling and pushing to the same repository and reconciling merge errors, which will be helpful in the future when working with a team on the same project. For my part of the AirBnB app, I found it easy to create the models, controllers, and routes we'd be using, but coding the HTML for our homepage and each room page was a bit more time-consuming. A little more practice using HTML (and Bootstrap/CSS) will help me master the frontend as well as I can with the backend.
• I started practicing JavaScript this week since we'll be diving into that on Wednesday. I learned the basics of setting variables, accepting user input, and returning specific outputs. There's added punctuation and syntax in

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-03-12

Learnings

• Building on the last lesson where we created and manipulated multiple tables, we learned an easier way to connect tables using belongs_to and has_many (like attaching images to products, products to suppliers, etc). I created a new Rails app twitter-app so I can practice creating and connecting database tables this week.
• We covered Authentication and how webpages will hash a user's password before storing it (this is why you can only reset your password and not recover your old one!). When accessing a webpage, the browser itself stores the data rather than the site's servers (known as cookies). Web tokens are in that category, so when a user logs in and their password input matches the hashed password stored by the site, the site returns a web token. bcrypt is a Ruby gem that allows you to set up a hashed password for your app, so we were able to set up authentication for our mini capstone. It's exciting to

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-03-08

Learnings

• While I'm starting this journey with very little coding knowledge, I feel like I have other skills and strengths that will lend themselves to finding success in software development. The main part of my job for the last few years has been communicating financial aid procedures and documents to college students, so I've learned to be an effective communicator and coach when it comes to explaining new concepts to someone else. I'm also highly adaptable to new environments and cultures which helps me be a better teammate (also helps when you like to travel!). -We're now creating and manipulating multiple tables of information inside of our mini capstone. I'm becoming fluent at creating models & controllers, seeding data, and generating migrations. I still need to practice how to use methods to connect the data between tables, like Product with Supplier.

Interesting things/links

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-02-28

Learnings

• Today we focused on the database and manipulating it. Using the commands
  rails db:drop
rails db:create
rails db:migrate
rails db:seed
  we were able to create, destroy and rebuild our database. We added new contacts in db/seeds.rb then ran db:seed to import those to our rails server.
• Last night after class I added the Faker gem to my contacts-api and in the seeds.rb file, I ran it 100x to create 100 new contacts to seed. The Faker gem is extremely versatile in what information can be retrieved to create fake data, I'm sure I'll be using it in more projects in the future.
• We began work on our mini capstone today. I created mini-capstone-api using rails new and set up a new database, new model Product, new controller products, then using the Faker gem I seeded 10 instances of Product. In my routes, I created a route to display JSON for all products and another route to display JSON for all

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-02-27

Learnings

• Today we continued learning about Rails, starting with being able to persist data through a program. We created a Contacts app along with a database using the code below:
  rails new contacts-api
cd contacts-api
rails db:create
  Then we created a model file contact.rb and set up a class with various attributes (first name, last name, email, & phone number) which would make up our data. Then with rails console we could use irb on the terminal to create/read/update/destroy (CRUD) contacts.
• To do the same thing but faster, we used the code rails generate model Model_name attribute:class_type to set up the model and rails db:migrate to create a table with the data that our model could interact with.
• We then connected today's learnings with our previous lesson about hosting a rails server to display our data. To do this we first started a server rails server then in a new tab, cr

aakashmsoni

Work Journal

Tracker of my coding journey. Updated as needed.

2023-02-26

Learnings

• We started with learned about the beginnings of Rails framework. We started with creating a new sample app and database, then ran a local server to display our app in the browser. We set up a controller within our sample app folder (learned cmd + T to open new tab in terminal) and once up, had our controller and routes open side-by-side. We set up the route to 'get' our method from the controller, then in the controller we defined the method to be run (using render json:). We started with simple messages, then expanded our code to create a fortune app and a lotto numbers app.
• We discussed why coding is interesting to us. Coding can be used in so many different ways and it's helpful to explore what drives your passion behind learning to code, whether it comes intrinsically or extrinsically. The Awesome Interests page has some good resources on how