WDI Day Forty-Six: Building a MEAN App & Starting a MEAN Lab

We had an introduction to adding Angular to the mix when building apps with Mongo DB, Express JS, and Node JS. However, the intro was a little too brief for everyone’s liking. Essentially we walked through an exercise that incorporated Angular with the rest of the stack, but not many of us were feeling at all confident with this new component.

After attempting to complete the in-class assignment, we were introduced to our lab for the week – building a MEAN stack application. We could either work in groups or alone. Although I enjoy working with others, when I’m struggling to retain new information, I do much better being able to struggle and absorb things on my own a little bit before returning to the group. Thus I opted for working on my own project.

It was a bit of a struggle – I tried to walk through the in-class assignment several times, but was unable to build something that could function. Next I started Googling all sorts of tutorials, desperate to find a working example of a way to format and use all these different pieces together. Luckily, I finally stumbled upon something that worked and helped me add basic CRUD functionality to the app. Once I had the working pieces in place, I pretty much called it a day. I was pretty sleep deprived from the day before, but I did indeed successfully complete a large chunk for the lab.

I’m hoping that tomorrow goes well and that I can successfully refine this application. I have a sturdy foundation now–all I want to do now is add to it and read over a few documents to make sure I’m understanding everything involved with the basics for the MEAN stack.

WDI Day Forty-Five: Mongoose with Express & Intro to the MEAN Stack

After feeling really frustrated with Angular JS, I spent the weekend reviewing a few exercises and found myself beginning to feel a little bit better about Angular. I think the problem was that I was so overwhelmed with my group project, trying to tackle the front-end and back-end on my own, that it was all too easy to get discouraged by every technology we were using.

Today we did more work with Express and Mongoose, and worked on a lab where we created a very basic CRUD app in Express. I’m liking Express better than Angular thus far, but I really do need to immerse myself with both more to really know for sure how I feel. We also received a bit of an overview of the MEAN stack, but only really focused on using Mongo, Express, and Node. I’m looking forward to seeing how we incorporate Angular with this stack.