Hello Friends!

If you'd like to read up on my blog post over the holiday, click here.

This week has flown by. In fact, with the holidays coming up, our bootcamp schedule has been adjusted to account for the incoming holiday slowdown.

That being said, I started the week off by taking our code challenge. This code challenge had us fetching data from an API, handling the data and using it to build and manipulate some React Components to build a "Bot Battle" website.

It looked like this:

We were given an hour and a half to complete the MVP (minimal viable product) which consisted of:

• fetching the data
• populating the robot selection options
• adding on click events to add a robot to your "army"
• clicking on a robot in your army to remove it

There were several bonus challenges, but I struggled with some setup during the beginning of the code challenge, and spent time trying to comment my MVP code. I covered MVP and passed the code challenge!

Auth, Routing, and Project Week

We learned a lot about React last week, so our instructor spent time educating us on some neat features of React that will be particularly helpful for our projects. We covered:

• React routing (a clean way to conditionally render components)
• Asynchronous methods and how to handle them
• Lifecycle methods
• Container and Presentational Components

And with the holidays coming up, our instructor decided to let us have a head start on building our projects. Many people will not be working during the holidays (many are flying back to their respective homes for the holidays to spend with their loved ones), so we were given the project guidelines in advance.

The guidelines here are minimal but be sure that you:

• Use a Rails API backend with a separate React frontend that are created in two different Github repositories.
• Have at least three resources on the backend and your application must have full CRUD actions for at least one resource.
• Must have at least two different client-side routes (i.e. use react-router). Ex: even if your whole app is mostly a single page app, have the form to signup be found at /signup
• Optional: Your application can have authentication/authorization. You are welcome to use an auth template as discussed in class.

I took the liberty of trying to get a head start by planning my application, here's a couple snips of my planning process (I will talk more about my whole project in the upcoming weeks):

Career Coaching

So a big part of Flatiron's program is its 1-on-1 career coaching. This week a member of the career coaching team sat down with our cohort to discuss the upcoming career coaching process. Here were the main points:

• Each one of us will get a career coach
• Coaches will help us network, find opportunities, and polish our presence
• They are NOT getting us jobs
• At the end of our 15 week program, we have 90 days to "declare our job search" (the 90 days is actually to complete some Flatiron specific work to educate us on how to be effective at searching for tech jobs)
• Career coaches are also available during your program if you want to sit down and practice anything from mock interviews, algorithm practice, or networking

Next Week

So next week is the Christmas holiday. Flatiron students have the entire week off. I plan on working through it on my project (and will have a blog post about the general project process), but I want to also spend some quality time with my partner. I hope the rest of you enjoy a fantastic holiday season with your loved ones as well!

Good luck with your own endeavors!
Shawn