This Week I've been revisiting the Evercraft project from the bootcamp. The Evercraft project is all about Test-Driven Development (TDD) while building a domain model. This project consist of several iterations, each introducing new features and requirements, I limited myself to only the first two iterations for now. A side product of this project is writing a massive amount of code and learning a lot about the language you are coding it in. I was motivated to redo this project by my desire to sharpen my Python skills. Python is the backend language we started learning at the Awesome Inc U bootcamp and I want to ensure my full stack skills are honed so I can be ready to not only use them on my personal projects but contribute to my future employer.

Agile development is an approach towards software development, focused more around the customer, than around the initial plans. Agile is named aptly since the whole process it covers is agile in the way that if the plans change no matter the reason, the development should be able to pivot without nuking and paving the entire project and starting from the ground. Agile methodologies also include communication and collaboration between multiple teams who are working on separate aspects of the project. This week we solely focused on our MVPs, and besides me updating my portfolio with new stuff I've learned, there was no coding this week. Definitely was a different week that was slow to start, but it highlights an importance aspect of agile development, the MVP is the a way to obtain the most data for the project with the least effort while providing something for the customer.

I think it's pretty hard to narrow what i'm struggling with the most in the tech stack. Some times I struggle with aligning front end components, other times trying to get the specific data from queries can be a hassle. Django definitely helps with queries though and sometimes bootstrap cooperates and aligns stuff how I want.

Theres a lot of similarities between JS and Python, they both have similar functions and abilities, both are pretty capable of the same stuff. Where they differ at is , Python is unable to access the DOM like JS can, and they both have there own syntax rules and formatting.

My biggest hurdle probably was stepping outside of VanillaJS, since thats where most of my prior experience was, I didn't even think about single page applications being a thing prior to React's introduction. I just assumed that every webpage had its own HTML file that a bunch a stuff of copied and pasted to each time. My next hurdle I think will be just back-end in general with no visuals to look at for immediate feedback on if something is working or not. I also definitely know the final project will be the biggest hurdle at the end of the road, as well as all the interviews I'll probably have to do before landing a career.

I've learned that CLI's are the original way people had to operate computers,before GUIs and mouses took over. I think to the uninformed they are, because you don't know what to say, what the computer can understand or what it expects from you. I would say after some time with them (learning Git commands and navigating files with just CLI), they aren't scary and they actually improve speed, because as you learn more commands and get more familiar with them, you have to take your hands away from the keyboard less. Navigating GUIs are inherently slower but more user friendly.

I think JavaScript Libraries at first are hard to use because they introduce new things and new ways to do things that were previously impossible. Having one week with React under my belt, I would say they aren't really hard to use. Its still Javascript, just with a some new syntax and built in functions

The most basic definition of pseudocode to me, is a high level 'coding language'. A more in depth definition would be, pseudocode is every step that you want the computer to go through,broken down into the most basic logic, until you have identified everything needed for every step. Its writing out all possible functions you may need, and all variables that function may need or a variable that every function in the program needs access to. There are lots of ways to add to your pseudocode, so to help you think more in depth about everything.

You can't have everything right when you want it ,and you can't always expect to get back the results you want. thats how APIs work,you have to program accordingly so as not to hinder the User experience by waiting on the results of an API. You must program defensively incase the API doesn't return what you expected.

Bootstrap Has way more classes than i know what to do with , but oddly still is very limiting sometimes, so figuring out when its better to use bootstrap or normal CSS will help me a lot in the future. Bootstraps 'justify-content-center' and 'justify-content-center' are the most important for aligning stuff i'd argue and yet they're the most finicky,sometimes they don't work at all or don't work on children elements and I ended up having to repeat the class name on 3 elements within each other.

HTML/CSS/JS each play an important role in the whole UX process. While we could write everything in pure HTML that wouldn't be a pleasant experience and I believe the internet would be a way less interesting place if every site looked and behaved exactly the same. No one wants to go a site that looks like its been around since the dawn of computers.

Week one wasn't what I expected, its been slower and not as code oriented as I would think. Although I admit, I didn't even know what a version control system was, but after git's introduction I can absolutely understand the importance of it. I would hate to have to manual revert a big chunk of code after I found out it was buggy or unusable. I also appreciate the slow intro into everything instead of jumping off on the deep end.