WDI Day Forty-Eight: Web Sockets and Lab Time

Web sockets are a way that users can interact in real time with each other on websites. During class we did a quick tutorial where we created a chatroom – it was some pretty cool stuff. After walking through the chatroom with socket.io, we tried to add Angular to the mix, and yet again it tripped me up a bit.

In the afternoon the instructors announced the web socket lab, where we will have to build a game with the MEAN stack and use web sockets. I can’t believe how many labs we’ve had – here I thought this weekend I would be able to get a head start on my final project. Looks like I’ll be refactoring the lab that was due this morning and have to complete yet another project.

I still feel pretty shaky with Angular JS, so I’m going to attempt to do several tutorials over the weekend. I did manage to put a basic MEAN stack framework in place for my lab project that I’ll work on customizing more tomorrow. I am also going to attempt to create Tic Tac Toe.

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-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