WDI Day Forty-Seven: MEAN Lab

The MEAN stack is pretty difficult to work with – at least it is for someone who is completely new to it. I enjoy working with Mongo DB, Node.js, and Express.js. The problem child in the stack is Angular – I’m realizing I’m not grasping everything that I thought I was.

Today was the last day to work on our MEAN stack lab. I decided to create an app where users can post their projects and have other users critique their projects. Users can upvote/downvote projects as well as critiques.

I was able to successfully complete the following:

  • Have users create new projects, delete existing projects, and view all projects
  • Have users upvote/downvote projects
  • Have users add critiques for different projects
  • Have users view all critiques made on projects
  • Have users upvote/downvote critiques
  • Seed the database with dummy data
  • Use show/hide Angular directives to make a better user experience

At this time, I have yet to do the following:

  • Allow users to update posts
  • Add the ability to delete comments
  • Create RegEx to prevent users from submitting critiques if the critique uses banned words or phrases
  • Polished styling (I was only able to do some preliminary styling)
  • Launch the app to Heroku

Although building this application was a huge struggle, I felt as though the application functioned a lot better than my project 3. It was also quite a learning experience!

Project Details:

MEAN stack application where users can upload projects and have other users upvote/downvote their projects. Users can also comment and upvote/downvote comments.

View the project

Technology Used:

  • MongoDB
  • Express JS
  • Angular JS
  • Node JS
  • Heroku

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-Four: Express & Mongo Intro

It’s been an exhausting week, but thankfully projects are over and today we had an introduction to Mongo and Express. We reviewed Mongo DB, which is a no SQL database, and used Mongoose to make queries. When it comes to databases, I’m realizing that I really enjoy working with querying for information. For some reason there’s something fun about that.

Express proved to be a little bit confusing. It made me realize that this weekend I need to review Angular JS and also do a little document diving with Express. I want to make sure things make a lot more sense to me in the upcoming weeks.

Resources

WDI Day Twenty-Eight: Testing with RSpec, Many to Many Relationships, & CRUD

We briefly got an overview on setting up tests with RSpec. The syntax was a little strange to me, and I’m realizing I really need to dive back into older things we covered just to ensure I’ve got a good grasp of everything. I won’t have a chance to do that this weekend since I have to work like crazy on my second project, but once that’s done with, I’m looking forward to reviewing things we covered earlier. Later we did a few exercises with many to many relationship models. I understand the concept, it’s just the actual use of this is something that will take some time for me struggling on the side with it. Once the lessons were over with, I worked like crazy on my homework assignment. Here’s a screenshot of the welcome view: coffeecheck-screenshot I had a lot of fun putting it together, but I probably spent more time than necessary styling it. And now I’m off to start working on my second project, so hopefully I”ll be off to a good start.

Project Details:

Ruby on Rails app will CRUD functionality where users can add, update, and delete coffee shops and coffee drinks. View the project

Technology Used:

  • Ruby
  • Ruby on Rails
  • psql
  • Heroku