My Hackathon experience

Wednesday, 9 February 2022 - 9:52pm

After two very intense weeks, my team submitted our hackathon entry today!

We are quite thrilled with our achievement, and we even brought home the "Most Technical Endeavour" prize from the Breaking Into Tech Community!

I personally feel like I have learned so much. I am happy I was able to take the lead on the backend architecture and managed to create a fully functioning authentication system.

The biggest challenge for me was to interact with ReactStrap, which I had never seen before. While it comes with los of useful features that can make web development so wuick, it was a bit difficult to understand how to use those components to my advantage.

More Hackathon news

Saturday, 29 January 2022 - 4:04pm

After a very productive zoom call this morning, we collectively decided to code the frontend in ReactJS, as two of us have experience with it.

I spent most of my morning setting up Django Rest Framework, creating and testing APIs: I managed to successfully code the authentication and authorisation part of the APIs, which I am pretty happy with.

My biggest challenge today was deployment! Heroku threw errors at me for a good couple of hours and I really couldn't understand what had gone wrong: the build was successful, but the app kept crashing.

After a million attempts at googling the issue and reading other people's solutions on StackOverFlow, I realised VSCode's predictive text had decided to autonomously import a module that was completely unnecessary, and it turned out to be a fairly quick fix, eventually!

My first Hackathon

Friday, 28 January 2022 - 6:28pm

I am thrilled to have joined my first Hackathon!

I am working within a randomly created team of 3 to build a Reading Challenge App for the 2022 Dev Week Hackathon, and I am pretty excited!

The team skills are pretty varied, but given my Full Stack experience I have decided to take on board most of the Backend: easier said than done!
I haven't come across any particular road bumps (yet!) and I am happy I was able to create an action plan!
I have been successful in managing my work flow so far, and I have implemented procedures for the team to follow, as some are not familiar with backend practices.

I am excited for our zoom catch up tomorrow and for a little live coding session!

Learning Types

Sunday, 16 January 2022 - 6:49pm

And... just like that, life took me astray for a few days!

I am back on track today: researched TypeScript and tried to understand how it works and how it could be helpful in an enterprise environment and I have started working on the frontend of my AisleView app!

At present it's mostly a general setup, but I am laying the foundations to work on my React components tomorrow.

JS deep dive

Sunday, 9 January 2022 - 11:30pm

I spent most of my coding time today working on the JavaScript resources I found on W3C: the training materials are excellent and there is some kind of reassurance in learning from such an institution.

I briefly tidied up my portfolio and fixed a responsiveness bug I had in my Stack page, collected other resources on accessibility (a11y) and internationalisation (i18n) and I put together some light-reading material about Sass preprocessor.

I am looking forward to mastering all the frontend technologies, I find them so interesting and I like that they really are the point of interaction between humans and computers 👩 ❤️ 💻.

A11y studies

Saturday, 8 January 2022 - 10:49am

Today was dedicated to frontend.
I have long been an advocate for accessibility and I decided to gain some formal recognition of my efforts, so today I pursued and obtained a certification badge from Gynmasium.

The course was taught by Ethan Marcotte who, I was unaware, is the "creator" of responsive web design.
It was very interesting to learn about the different techniques that can be used to make web browsing more accessible, from focus states to viewport aware design and I look forward to incorporating them in my works from now on!

What's been happening

Friday, 7 January 2022 - 4:26pm

- I freed up some Heroku space by undeploying a super glitchy app and transferring it to localhost only
- I have researched new cloud hosting services and decided to stick to Heroku for my new app's backend, but move to Netlify for its React frontend
- I have deployed my new app's backend to Heroku
- I have updated my portfolio's projects page and this blog

I am very much looking forward to playing with some frontend tomorrow!

Post Grad activities

Saturday, 18 December 2021 - 2:59pm

It has been a little while since I had the chance to update this blog! What's been happening?

I completed my crowdfunding app! After the Django backend we spent some time learning React and I was able to create a nice little full stack application: find it here!

Our final group project with SheCodes saw 5 of us dealing with real client's expectations and deadlines, multiple git fires!, MVPs and collaboration. It certainly wasn't easy but what we managed to create and deliver can be found here.

On Tuesday 7th December, SheCodes Australia organised an amazing Showcase for our graduation: it was incredible to see how far we've all come since day 1 and a little bit bittersweet to know that, although I am keen to gain some free time back!, this chapter of my life is over. Onwards and upwards!

I have spent the past couple of weeks working on my very own full stack app! Whilst the concept of it is fairly simple, it will hopefully help me solve organisation issues within my very own household, so I am definitely keen to see it come to life!

Crowdfunding app and REST API

Friday, 1 October 2021 - 4:58pm

In the past few weeks, my SheCodes journey took me to Django-land and I must admit it took me a little while to wrap my head around it all.
At first, it all seemed so complicated and I couldn't quite understand how it would all come together.
The more I delved into it, though, the more I understood how the framework works and why it is so convenient to use: regardless of the project, most of the structure has already been put together!

Recently, we have been focussing on the creation of the backend of our Grand Project: a Crowdfunding app!

The backend was created with the Django REST framework, which allowed us to put together the working structure of the application.

We are now tackling the front end, which is developed with JavaScript and the React framework - it is so exciting to be jumping back to the front end as I feel like it comes a bit more natually to me.
I am looking forward to seeing my progress in the next few weeks!

Making friends with Django

Saturday, 21 August 2021 - 10:28am

We have been tackling a different challenge at She Codes these past couple of weeks: Django!

I would lie if I said it didn't feel overwhelming at first! As a Python-based web framework, Django is supposed to tie Python and front-end together and making things easier, development-side.
The learning curve felt extra steep though, as there were so many loose bits and I couldn't quite wrap my head around the what's and the why's.
As one of my mentors put it, it felt like "Drinking from a firehose" haha!

A little extra dedication went a long way though! I spent some time reviewing the course material as well as started a separate "blog" project in Django to solidify my learning and it's paying off! I will hopefully be able to have a couple of fully functioning Django projects to my portfolio soon, which is exciting!

Lockdown productivity

Wednesday, 4 August 2021 - 1:03pm

A few days into lockdown and productivity is starting to kick in.

I am ~this~ close to complete the weather project in Python (I am struggling a little bit with the final daily summary, as I don't think I am returning in the correct format).

I have been dedicating quite a lot of time to this very website, and it has been a fun ride so far! I am perfecting my CSS skills and it is very satisfying to see my design come to life!

Progress on Python weather project

Saturday, 31 July 2021 - 10:12pm

Today, despite lockdown looming over Brisbane, the 2021 She Codes Plus cohort was able to meet in person at the Hub!

Luckily, we were able to focus on our Python projects (the deadline is fast approaching!) and got assistance from our mentors.

I was excited to finish most of my weather project functions and the all passed the test! I will be spending the next few days working on the summary functions and hopefully I will be comfortably finished by the end of the week.