Another week in the most intensive learning experience of my life thus far!

This week we spent a good portion of the beginning of the week on some theory and conventions. One of the more interesting ones was the Twelve-Factor App.

The Twelve-Factor App is a methodology that can be applied to applications in any programming language. The Twelve-Factor App simply says that the three stages of building, releasing and running must be separated - and it's very strict about it. You can read more about it here.

We then went into PostgreSQL and learned how to manipulate data to find the information we need using JOIN, INNER JOIN and LEFT join. There is an excellent way of getting used to the basics by playing this SQL murder mystery - I highly recommend it, I was finding it difficult to grasp it when it was initially explained but once I played the game, everything just seemed to click.

We then learned how to create a database on Heroku and then combined our knowledge of Node.js, PostgreSQL and the database on Heroku to store data we previously had stored in our code, into our database using our newfound knowledge. We also learned about the importance of .env file and it's usually where credentials for the cloud database.

A Heroku database and how the credentials look (don't worry the picture is from Google)

Finally came the Hackathon Friday!

We were tasked to put together all our experience and knowledge to put together a full-stack application...

Well, at least attempt to anyway!

In our group of three, we designed a back-end and we were able to READ (GET) but found it very difficult to CREATE (POST). It required us to combine our CRUD knowledge and PostgreSQL but we found it difficult to combine the two. I do feel like we were close and our thinking was right, but a few small adjustments and we could get it working.

Final Thoughts

This week felt like a flash and a blur! There was so much information that we had to learn and sometimes it felt like I was in over my head!

I have to admit, as it currently stands, I am definitely leaning towards the front-end over the back-end I am still excited to see what we've got to learn over the next few weeks and I cannot wait to be able to apply myself more.

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That was week 5 in a nutshell!

If you're still reading, thank you so much, I hope to use this blog to post and share my journey and the useful knowledge I gain throughout it! I would love to connect with other developers to see what they're learning and learn from them - please connect with me on the following:

Twitter: @codewithmohamed

Github: github.com/codewithmohamed

LinkedIn: Mohamed Mohamud

Email: m.mohamud1992@gmail.com