Learning by Tutorials
I’ve been searching for good tutorial projects to help learn some new technologies and also provide clarification on familiar skill sets. I came across a company called Thinkster that offered a really great package. You can choose from a multitude of back end languages and front end languages, and since everything is set up to utilize the same API, you can mix and match to your hearts content.
The end product will be a Medium clone that looks something like this…
I have experience with Ruby on Rails for back end server implementation, but I’ve been really trying to get a grasp of Node so I chose that as my back end. Angular was on my list as well, but at this stage in my career, I do not want to spread myself too thin. Although I see Angular everywhere while looking for a job, I decided to work with React/Redux for a few reasons. 1) I love react! 2) My redux skills needed some serious improvement and 3) Part of me feels like Angular will turn into a legacy framework as React or even new technologies take the main stage.
I’ve completed the back end using Node.express. I enjoyed this process. Similar to many other learning situations, there was the long period of ‘I don’t get it’, then came the ‘Ok, this is starting to make sense’, following by being able to anticipate the next steps of the tutorial successfully.
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Having Rails experience, it was extremely helpful to visualize the difference between these two back end languages. I was able to easily compare the difference between Models, routes, requests and their use of JWT authentications.
Although I’m nowhere near being able to whip up a Node project, having completed this section of the tutorial really helped me wrap my head around a concept I’ve heard much about but never worked with.
I’m about half way through with the front end side and although I have experience with React/Redux, it’s still difficult at time to wrap my head around the way these frameworks operate.
Practice and repetition are really helpful for me, so during this process I try to repeat steps back to back and make sure I understand the entire step before moving on.
Even though this is a tutorial, there are a ton of bugs that are constantly being worked out. By next week, I hope to have this tutorial fully functional as well as deployed! I’ll be sure to include the link in my following post!
Thanks!
