JS101 Session 19 July - Putting the App together, how best to start in web dev, JS resources, Hello and Goodbye

[katjad]

Our last session before the summer break. We are starting again on 13 September and will have another session a week after that, before continuing with the usual 2 week rhythm.

We had two new people attending today, Kevin and Tom @tdw89, welcome! - But we also had to say Goodbye. @mjg17, who has been with the group since one of the first sessions about 1.5 years ago, will be off to Copenhagen in a week. Thanks for contributing so much to the group and much luck in the new job!

@me--2014 is also starting a job, for a few months to start with, but she's not leaving Bristol so will hopefully be able to come to a session again, and it looks like she will also be involved with CodeHub evening sessions.

What we did this time:

• Had a look at the current state of our App, which has reached a temporary conclusion with its parts being 'linked up' now, i.e. you can persist data now (the Create and Read is there at least, not yet Update and Delete)
• Talked about what is helpful to learn when looking for a web dev job; and in how far this group can help
• Otherwise we looked at what we were going to do from September, and we also collected our best JS resources - a bit like we did before Christmas; I will add the resources to the App, and want to put it on a hosting platform, although this will not be before mid August. (I will add them to the current resources.json file though and commit and merge, so everybody can have their own copy and play around with that ;))
• After the meetup, a few of us talked about organising more events with CodeHub, which would not only be about JavaScript; we settled on doing two in the autumn, one evening workshop on Git, and one whole-day JavaScript event (but with a different format from previous JS workshops)

The App The most recent additions to the app are:

• Using React-Router which allows us to map components to URLs - thanks @ben198 We also discussed the different ways to make the store available to components. At the moment this is done through Provider and context.
• I then added a new route for displaying the OrganisationAdd component, which is a form for adding a new resource. It was interesting to first write the input in a way so that the state got updated constantly, then switching to querySelector as it had been done in our original master branch.
• But before this, I wrote the beginning of an API in server.js through which resources can be added or made available in the app. It took me a while to work out how to use the lokiJS wrapper that @mjg17 had written, but was rewarding when I worked it out! I also started to understand a little about how Promises are written.
• In the index.js, I eventually used an async call to the API to retrieve the resources. I think there is a way to get the initial state through some middleware, but for now I just did it like that. It was anyway interesting that in the createStore method you can pass the initialState as the second argument.

Dev jobs, what best to learn, can JS101 help? To whittle down current members' opinions/experiences, next to a solid understanding of HTML and CSS, and in many places Wordpress, these are really useful things to have:

• Knowing how to use Git
• Using a texteditor like Sublime, Atom or Brackets (or vim! ;) ) and Chrome Dev Tools
• Basic commandline skills

And yes, then there's of course JavaScript. This will often still be jQuery, depending on the kind of agency you work for, but even with jQuery, just understanding more of JS will help. Good places to start with JavaScript:

• Eloquent JavaScript, still favoured by many members of our group
• Codecademy for first experience, but otherwise some other online resources might be more helpful. Treehouse, Udacity, FreeCodeCamp.com; also, see the resources below
• In terms of help from the group, we do not really teach JavaScript, but I think the ways in which it can help is point to resources/ working through them together, share experiences, help each other out when coding; pair programming; also both preparing and listening to little presentations about frameworks/programming concepts etc - and then there's working on the app, collaborating through Git;

Favourite resources Here is our list of current favourite resources/things we found interesting @me--2014 –- Eloquent JavaScript http://eloquentjavascript.net/ , React Lab https://github.com/codehuborg/react-lab by @rinse0ut @mjg17 -- http://devdocs.io Collection of documentation for major web programming languages/frameworks @gicela http://javascript.com/resources, book Get programming with JS https://manning.com/books/get-programming-with-javascript Kevin (don't have git account yet) - https://www.lynda.com/ @tdw89 Kerbal Space Program https://kerbalspaceprogram.com/en/ :) @marckimbrey -– Funfunfunction videos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OQZKh8Bjdv0&list=PL0zVEGEvSaeFSwPn06GKArptSxiP1Gff8 @ben198 - Learn.CodeAcademy videos https://www.youtube.com/user/learncodeacademy @klong – SAM pattern http://sam.js.org/ pattern; also Safaribooks subscription - not cheap, but great collection of resources @wingedeel – Treehouse JS courses https://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-basics , React and Redux on Udemy https://www.udemy.com/react-redux/learn/v4/overview and also egghead videos https://egghead.io/courses/getting-started-with-redux @katjad - YDKJS https://github.com/getify/You-Dont-Know-JS, nodeschool.org

I also suggested people pick an area of the app that they want to work towards knowing more about. People mostly didn't have a concrete area, but a lot of use want to learn React and Redux better, which would of course help the app. Gicela also mentioned learning ES6.

Have a great summer everyone, and see you in September!

/cc @CodeHubOrg/js2016

[mjg17]

Thanks for another great write-up, Katja.

I'll miss you guys! Thanks for your good company. I've really enjoyed the supportive and collaborative atmosphere of our meetings.

[katjad]

You must have read that very quickly :) Thanks for this, and we'll miss you, too!

[Gicela]

Thank you for the write up, @katjad @mjg17 Thank you for all your contributions. Keep in touch 👍

[wingedeel]

Brilliant write-up @katjad . Thanks. Am also looking at the different ways to make the store available to components. After doing it the provider and context way the next step seems to be using react-redux bindings. Will try and get my head round this over the summer! Have a great break everybody, see you in September.

[katjad]

Of course I left it to the last minute to sort out hosting for the app, which had been my objective for the holidays. But I'm astounded how painless it was in the end. It is all in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR06NoSzAXY . The app itself of course is still a total construction site (and still I'm excited we got it that far!) ;) Also, so far I did not manage to add a resource through the Admin interface. So I just did that locally and then copied resources.json to the remote server. Anyway, it is here: https://js.codehub.org.uk. This is the "tiles" branch by the way.

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday!! /cc @CodeHubOrg/js2016

[wingedeel]

Woohoo! Thanks Katja. Great to see the app online and a very useful video.

On Mon, Sep 12, 2016 at 2:32 AM, Katja Durrani notifications@github.com wrote:

Of course I left it to the last minute to sort out hosting for the app, which had been my objective for the holidays. But I'm astounded how painless it was in the end. It is all in this video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kR06NoSzAXY . The app itself of course is still a total construction site ;) Also, so far I did not manage to add a resource through the Admin site. So I just did that locally and then copied resources.json to the remote server. Anyway, it is here: js.codehub.org.uk

Looking forward to seeing you on Tuesday!! /cc @CodeHubOrg/js2016 https://github.com/orgs/CodeHubOrg/teams/js2016

— You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub https://github.com/CodeHubOrg/discussions/issues/31#issuecomment-246219650, or mute the thread https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/AARfbvI6jz-du54bdc_xnuK9rQ54wY-9ks5qpKu1gaJpZM4JR4lB .