Hack Reactor Week 5 Review

I'm attending the Hack Reactor 12 Week immersive coding bootcamp from 11APR to 8JUL in an effort to develop my programming skills to offer a wider range of services to my clients. The schedule is jam packed with 11 hours of coding content 6 days a week Mon-Sat. I'll be keeping a journal of my experiences with the program here.

It's the week before midterms. We have our technical assessment (TA) next Monday and this is the week in which we prepare. We've been given two practice sprints, a glossary app and a multi-step form checkout app, that will cover everything we've learned up until this point.

Our instructors say that we are now fulls tack developers! I suppose it's true. With our experiences in Mongo / mysql databases, Express server, React, and Node.js, we have built out the essentials of a MERN stack. It feels we've only just barely scratched the surface of these tools and there is so much more to know.

The technical assessment will be gated, which means you can fail. There's no grade given, just pass/fail. From my conversations with alumni, it sounds like if you can manage the practice apps on your own, then you should be fine for the exam. I'm excited. I haven't taken an exam in a while now so it's kind of fun. I'm feeling confident enough with the material that I'm not dreading it at least. Since the week one mulligan, a couple other folks have dropped out of the pod but maybe just two or three folks. It makes sense to have a gated assessment at this point because following that, we dive into team assignments. Some sort of minimum standard needs to be established such that the teams can succeed.

I really enjoyed the practice apps this week. We got to work on them on our own which was a nice change in pace from pair programming and allowed me to really dive into some new things. Some things I explored were: pico css library, pagination from server, Redux state management system in React, and cookies and sessions.

Here's a quick demo of the glossary app. I enjoyed watching my server and database communicate in the console 😂 . So satisfying.

In other news I'm back in the kitchen and also got covid again! For sure got it on the plane coming home from a quick trip to Boston for Heather's work party. 😣