I continued going through the rest of the Local Library tutorial. I made some progress and finished the templating section of the tutorial. This section had a lot of subsections and although they were not difficult to cover they were a bit time consuming to read through.
With each step I take in the course I get closer to the highlight topic of web security. The reason why I am so focused on this topic is because I previously failed a coding challenge because I could not wrap my head around the backend section of the challenge. I passed with flying colors on the frontend portion but really struggled with the backend. The area where I struggled the most was with web security. So… because I am such a sore loser I have never gotten over that loss. I have improved in my backend skills but web security topics like authorization, authentication, JSON web tokens, etc are things I am still not comfortable with. Hopefully once I get through these next sections I will have improved enough to revisit that project and correct my mistakes.
TLDR;
Okay, so here are the highlights of what I did:
- IT Support Course -> Started an IT Support course on Coursera. My little brother said he was taking the course so I thought it would be fun if we both went through it. There were some interesting topics listed. I am particularly interested in the Computer Networking sections since that is on my to-do list of things to study.
- Practice -> Continued working through the practice ‘Local Library’ project in the MDN ExpressJS guide. Finished part 5 of the tutorial. The next part seems to deal with handling data entry for the library. So far I have only covered displaying static pages.
Goal For Round 8 of the #100DaysofCode Challenge
This is my eighth round of the “#100daysofcode” challenge. I will be continuing my work from round five, six, and seven into round eight. I was working through the book “Cracking the Coding Interview” by Gayle Laakmann McDowell. My goal was to become more familiar with algorithms and data structures. This goal was derived from my goal to better understand operating systems and key programs that I use in the terminal regularly e.g. Git. This goal was in turn derived from my desire to better understand the fundamental tools used for coding outside of popular GUIs. This in turn was derived from my desire to be a better back-end developer.
I am currently putting a pause on the algorithm work to build some backend/full stack projects. I primarily want to improve my skills with the back-end from an implementation perspective. I have improved tremendously in terminal and CLI skills but I lost focus due to how abstract the algorithm concepts got. I wanted to work on things that were more tangible until I can get to a position where I could directly benefit from improving my algorithm skills and theoretical knowledge. So that’s the focus right now. Build my backend skills and prove my full stack capabilities by building some dope projects.
Again, I still have no idea if my path is correct but I am walking down this road anyways. Worst case scenario I learn a whole bunch of stuff that will help me out on my own personal projects. Best case scenario I actually become one of those unicorn developers that go on to start a billion dollar company… You never know LOL.