Broker to Coder? - 7 weeks a'coding

previous article 'Broker to coder? - week 5'

Just over halfway through the programme and things have gotten a little easier over the last two weeks, covering Agile software development, then APIs, and finally React... components, components, components!

Week 5 was a much-needed respite from coding, as the focus was around project delivery covering: Agile, Scrum, Kanban, requirement gathering, user stories, and problem-solving. We also saw pitches from six very different start-ups who are all looking for help to start building out their tech, we chose two to be our clients for the next 4 weeks.

The respite was lifted in week 6 and we were back into coding, but this week I felt much more comfortable with the concepts, now that I had overcome the proverbial JavaScript wall. We started the week looking at promises and how to use them to access APIs (an API I now understand is best compared to a contract - as it lays out the rules for interaction between software components), also looking at how to test using Postman. Another mini-challenge was laid down at this point, to use an API of our choosing to get data onto a webpage, which was relatively straightforward.

React was introduced midweek and things started to get really interesting, this brought in a lot more moving parts as there was now a whole library of files to contend with (I was told that this was nothing compared to Angular's directory structure and number of files). Also, we were now referring to everything as a component, which all sit in one big 'app component tree', this is where my mind was blown. You can make one giant class (which I liken to a mold), and then use the components, inside components, inside components.. (you get the idea) to build out webpages, much easier than manually bashing out HTML5, CSS and vanilla JavaScript files.

The client project also kicked off towards the end of the week, I choose to be part of the team with the start-up building a HR ticketing platform. We spent an afternoon requirements gathering with the product owner, then creating a backlog of epics in Trello. The next task was to build some wireframes to talk around and discuss feature prioritisation before the first sprint, which started this week.

So far so good still, another update soon.