Broker to Coder? - 11 weeks Full-stack time

previous article 'Broker to Coder? - 9 weeks down'

 This week we have focused on the back end looking at Node.js, RESTful APIs, Authentication and Private Routing,

In week 9, we learned about CRUD requests (made me chuckle too - create, read, update, delete) and authenticated CRUD.  We then learned about firebase authentication (logging in with an email address and using a user's Google account) and private routing(only being able to see certain parts of the app depending on permissions). All were relatively straight forward, this is probably because we were scratching the surface of the backend. 

In week 10, we moved on to learning about context in React, which is another way to pass data around an application (as an alternative to props), we used Node JS to build a RESTful API. We planned our application architecture to ensure our code was scalable and easy to maintain. The requests were handled and passed through routes, controllers and finally the model(which 'models' the data, that is sent in requests to the API). I used Postman (an app that checks what an API returns) to test my HTTP requests (which are how browsers and APIs communicate).

Client project - HR ticketing system:

Sprint 3

Went by pretty quickly with another, check-in with the product owners. The app now had a lot more functionality in it. I had been mainly working on tickets for the main dashboard, including a circle chart to show ticket status, a number of filters to view different tickets, and the ability to assign users to different tickets and then hooking this all up to the firebase database to dynamically update.

Sprint 4

We made the final touches to the app and tried to get as many tickets from the backlog completed before the end of the week, to polish off the functionality we had in the app. By the end of the week, we had a fully working app fit for a demo to clients, where a user can log in, got to a 'superuser' dashboard (create, edit, delete users), did a final demo of the app to our product owners, who were thrilled.

Here is the app: Intergr8 App (login: test@intergr8.com | pwd:123456)

This was a fun two weeks as it was great to finally have a proper look at the back end in detail and taking a decent step towards being a full-stack developer.

Actually building an API was pretty neat, and getting to experience the fulfillment of building and delivering a working app to a client. Although it was a lot of hard work overcoming the challenges of pair programming remotely, it was very rewarding to see it all come together.

We're nearly at the end of the course now, but I'm looking forward to next week when we get stuck into tech tests and will begin learning about Angular and Typescript (an alternative to React js)