Hack Reactor Week 6 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.

The technical assessment is over and we dove right into the first capstone project - FEC (Front End Capstone). We have been charged with building out a details page for an e-commerce website that is divided into four sections: Project Overview, Related Products, Question & Answers, Ratings & Reviews. I'll actually come back to this in a future post and instead focus on the technical assessment for this post.

The TA is a large exam - 6 hours on a Monday! I think the only tests I've taken that are longer than that are the SAT and the 8 hour exam at Nuke School Prototype. I'll try not to give too much away but at a high level we built out a blog app that allows a user to create new entries, list and view details, and has an admin page where the user can delete posts or set draft status. There is also a view tracker built in and some text parsing happening behind the scenes.

Here's a quick demo that shows what we were charged with building out in the six hour period. I should note that we were given the HTML and CSS so most of the work was in porting it over to React to render dynamically and connecting everything to our backend consisting of an Express server and mysql database.

Overall I feel that I did very well - I had enough time to attempt every section and submit a final project that functioned well and didn't crash through my testing. I worked right up until the final 2 minutes too! I was under pressure to get the final specification completed but nailed it at the end 😀. The practice sprints from last week prepared us very well and some of my classmates shared other Github repos that had useful practice prompts as well.