Wow did I need that three day weekend. I think we all did. After five weeks of nonstop coding it felt fantastic to get out of here, sleep in, and do some other stuff besides stare at countless lines of codes. I stayed home most of Saturday and on Sunday I picked up VT and we went to RS' house for a party. That was one crazy party and we ended up sleeping over. Monday I came into the Dojo briefly to do some fundamental Javascript in preparation for today but I was still in vacation mode and left after completing the first assignment. I woke up the next day in a grumpy mood, not wanting the three day weekend to end. When I checked my phone I saw an email from my German friend, telling me about what he's been up to the last few months, that he misses me, and that he is still holding onto the promise we made to each other to travel the world together. It means a lot to get a message from him and that was enough to wipe away the grumpiness, conclude my break, and face the new challenge of the MEAN stack.
MEAN stands for Mongo, Express, Angular, and Nodes. Each new stack gets incrementally harder but when we master it we'd be doing less work for better results. That was the main point we were told by the new instructor during today's introduction.
We would be spending the next two days completing fundamental Javascript materials since they will lay a crucial role in this stack, the same way PHP was important in the previous stack. HTML and CSS will still be used as before and will be in the following stack but that's universal while Javascript is emphasized especially here. The best part of using Javascript compared to PHP is that it is even-driven rather than procedurally driven, meaning our projects will have a more natural flow to them. The instructor used the analogy of having two roommates, one PHP and the other Javascript. On the day you're out of town and expecting a package to come in you ask PHP to sign for it when it arrives. PHP agrees to do this favor for you and he proceeds to wait at the door until the package arrives. The next time this situation arises you ask Javascript to pick it up for you and rather than waiting around for the package he does other tasks around the house and will only go to the door when the package arrives. That's how Javascript is much better off, allegedly. I'd just have to find out for myself.
We spent most of the pre-bootcamp working on Javascript so when we were assigned Javascript fundamentals that meant covering object-orientation. I spent most of the day covering classes and object instances. It was the same way with PHP, now I just need to realign myself to the Javascript way of doing it.
Coming here it felt like a brand new year of school with a new class entering, new instructors and TA's, and my class moving up to more advanced topics and responsibilities. My class got moved to a different section of the office and we rearranged our stuff like we were moving into the dorms. I mentioned earlier the student in the hybrid program who'd be joining us on this stack. Turns out that she was really behind all of us that she is starting up with the new class instead. So that's that.
Weeks ago AN showed me Semantics UI, a front-end framework similar to Twitter Bootstrap but apparently offering more features. For this stack we thought it would be fun to switch to Semantics. So in the following days I'll be describing my experience with it. I already love Bootstrap so I want to know if Semantics could top that off.
It's after 10PM and I finished off my activities with object instances, trailing behind the more interactive features. I'm going to take off soon but I'm leaving in a good mood. Coding bootcamp is a roller coaster but it's a roller coaster ride I love and wouldn't trade for anything else right now.
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