What I've Been Doing

01 Nov 2015

Since August, I have been enrolled in a web development program at Epicodus in Portland, OR. I quit my job, and moved across the country, so I could spend every day learning new things and exploring a new city. I can’t say that I’ve done much exploring, but I have learned a lot in a short amount of time.

The class is split up into four parts: PHP, JavaScript, Drupal, and internship. Most days are spent pair programming, making simple web apps, to learn the fundamentals of web development. On Fridays, I complete a coding challenge that uses all of the concepts from the week.

The first 5 weeks were spent using PHP to develop web apps. I worked with the PHP framework Silex to make my apps and MySQL for my database. The final week was spent on a group project that I hope to spend more time developing in the future. For the project, my group and I created an app, Tap That, which allows users to find out what beers are on tap at local bars. It was a lot of fun and taught me how to work with others on a larger project.

JavaScript was the focus of the second 5 weeks of the class. I spent time getting comfortable with the differences between JavaScript and PHP while also becoming familiar with jQuery and AngularJS. I found AngularJS to be very interesting and spent most of my time trying to understand how to properly use it when making apps. Outside of class I worked on learning how to use AngularJS with Firebase to add a database to my apps and get comfortable using a NoSQL database. During the final week of learning about JavaScript, there was another group project where we made a simple online game using AngularJS.

Currently, I am in the final 5 weeks of the course and the focus is on using Drupal. Drupal is a robust content management system. I’ve been learning how to use the administrator interface, core/contributed modules, making custom modules, making sub-themes, and functional/unit testing. I will definitely continue to learn as much as I can about Drupal after class is over.

Starting on November 16th I will begin my internship. I will be spending a number of weeks working at a local front-end QA company, Plus QA. During my time there I hope to pick up valuable testing skills and learn about the development cycle for web applications. While I am there I will have the opportunity to learn from seasoned QA professionals and test applications on many desktop and mobile platforms.