What I learned from The Web Developer Bootcamp

I recently finished (finally!) The Web Developer Bootcamp on Udemy. I had started the course three times since purchasing in 2018. Previously the furthest I had made it was to the very end of the Front-End section. I don't want to write a review of the course, as there are plenty already. Instead I will explain what I learned (or didn't learn)

I already had a pretty good understanding of HTML/CSS prior to beginning the course, so I breezed through those chapters. I am by no means a CSS ninja, I did learn (or refresh upon) a few key CSS properties like how to float a div to make column layouts. The course also gives a good explanation of the bootstrap grid. Though to be perfectly honest I mostly use CSS Grid or Flexbox nowadays.

The basics of Javascript were also pretty familiar to me. However it had been a while since I was consistently coding so this was a great time to remember all the syntax and gotchas. Similarly with DOM Manipulation, the course gave me a good opportunity to re-read some MDN documentation. I enjoyed the project "Color Game" as well, I was able to do most of the project without watching the code-along so that was motivating.

Next was jQuery, which I had used on several of my FreeCodeCamp projects in the past. I feel pretty comfortable using it, though the course mainly covered how to do styling etc, and not the fun stuff like AJAX. I guess if and when I need to use it I will just look up the documentation

The Good Stuff

I learned a nice lesson during the "Patatap Clone" project. While I was feeling pretty confident, I dove right in without watching the videos...or reading the documentation. Then I spent a good while troubleshooting why I couldn't use the external library paper.js. Turns out I should have read the DOCUMENTATION first and would have saved myself a lot of headache. You need to write your paperscript code in the HTML body to avoid CORS errors in the browser. I broke the problem down into smaller steps which always helps me organize and feel more confident:

1. Draw a circle
2. Draw a circle on keypress (get random x/y coordinates from html body)
3. Draw a circle on keypress and fill with a random color
4. Make each circle grow over time (this one took a while, I ended up adding each circle to an array, then using the onFrame handler to make them grow by looping through the array on each Frame. I also had to look deep in the docs for the "scale" method on the Circle object)
5. Remove the circle after some condition... I chose "length > 2500" after some playing in the console

I think this project was really good. I was humbled having to read and re-read the documentation but it's a great practice to get into. I applied the principles learned in the beginning of the course (and from my overall studies) to complete the project without having to watch the code-along. It definitely improved my confidence that I can continue making projects instead of just staying in tutorial-hell.

I'm gonna wrap up this post here, it's getting a bit long. I will have a separate post on how I felt going through the backend portion of the course - which is my second time ever doing backend programming.

Thanks for reading!