Week Two is done and dusted!
I cannot believe I am already sat here again typing away for my blog. It feels like only a second ago I was typing my previous one.
Let's start with a breakdown of the week
This week was a busy one. With Monday being a bank holiday we only had four days at the bootcamp and we covered a lot. We started off on Tuesday but looking into the DOM (Document Object Model). We experimented to see how it worked and what we could change and our focus was mainly on document.querySelector(). One of our early tasks was to select a button on the html and increase an onscreen value by one when the button was clicked.
Following this we learnt about setInterval(), setTimeout(), addEventListener and events overall. This was a lot to take in but we had more to come.. fetch(). We started our fetch() journey with a Kanye West quote API. It generates a random quote each time it its accessed and we had to implement it into a pre-made webpage.
On Thursday we once again had a mindfulness session. Joseph Trodden presented our morning session and we completed a Myers-Briggs test on 16Personalities. Once we had our personality letters we were put into random groups of four and set to discuss how personalities may work together. Such as their strengths and weaknesses and how we can all take steps to make teams work better together. It was very interesting to see that variation, even in our small groups. It has been really nice to bring the knowledge from my Psychology degree into code and see how beneficial it is to creating a good team ethos.
And next up was HACKATHON FRIDAY!
This task was focused on our fetch() knowledge - we were given a list of APIs and we had to use one of them to put together a mini-project in a few hours.
These were the APIs that were recommended to us.
From this list my team liked the idea of creating a Dad Joke Generator. So we did just that.
Before we began with any code we spent time building a detailed plan. We knew as a team of three that we all might have our own idea of what we wanted to create and little details we wanted to add. The plan enabled us to all present our own ideas and work them together to make something we were all happy with. After we had completed the plan it was much easier to see how we were going to progress with the project.
One thing we all identified was that we felt most confident with the javascript and fetch functionality but were less confident with CSS and creating something that was user friendly and nice to look at. So with this in mind we got our skeleton of functionality working and then decided to make it look as good as we could and add quality of life features.
So here is a screenshot of the final product:
The page presented a joke when first loaded up and would generate a new one each time the button was clicked. Below the title we created a 'Previous Jokes' storage box that collected all the jokes that had been presented to the person on the page that they could scroll through (we also didn't all for the list to store duplicates!). Other than the obvious look our CSS also animated our characters face to move for each quote. One thing we wanted was to allow for a text to speech option to try and offer more support for those who may be visually impaired (as our focus was on usability) however we couldn't quite get this to work in the time frame.
That was my week in a nutshell! I think it is important to try and take away something from each day. So, like I did last week here is -
My main take away from each day in Week Two.
Tuesday -
I found Tuesday difficult but I pushed through and got some work done. It has showcased to me again the importance of communicating and perseverance over simply completing tasks. It was also nice hearing previous bootcamper's stories. If you don't put yourself in a position where you might fail you will never learn.
Wednesday -
Wednesday was great example of the importance of re-capping and consolidating knowledge. After Tuesday I felt I was behind and lost with my work on the DOM. However, on Wednesday we had a re-cap session in the morning and I had time to go over all of the tasks from Tuesday and complete them. After this I was able to learn more about timeout, timeIntervals and learn about the uses of APIs.
Thursday -
I had two main takeaways from Thursday. Firstly the morning session on personality types presented a new perspective on working with others: my Psychology degree will come in handy when working in various teams, not just during the bootcamp, but in my future career aswell. Secondly, the importance of correctly organising your code and data with syntax that makes sense. When browsing through APIs you really grasp the importance of organisation in code.
Friday -
I got to present on Friday with my team.We presented to 30 others and had two minutes to go through our process. This helped me develop my presentation skills, not just with confidence, but with fully understanding my code and being able to showcase it in a concise manner.
If you've got this far, thank you! My journey continues to show me just how much you can learn in a short space of time if you really apply yourself. If you want to follow along with my journey please do. If you want to contact me for any reason also the best place to connect with me is Twitter - @_pattisoj. You can also find my GitHub here. I hope you have a good week and, as always, happy coding!