It's been a while. The last few weeks months at MakerSquare have been crazy, good crazy, but nonetheless crazy. I've been on-site for an average of 80 hours per week for nearly three straight months. I'll fill you in...
So where has that time gone? Code; it's gone into code. In this time I've written tens of thousands of lines of code across a wide range of technologies spanning the stack front-to-back. Here's a brief list of what I've played with:
- Front-End ~
- EJS
- Handlebars
- Backbone.js
- Ampersand.js
- AngularJS & UI-Router
- React & React-Router
- Redux
- D3
- Back-End & Database ~
- Node.js
- Express
- Koa
- EJS
- Jade
- MongoDB
- PostgreSQL
- Build-Tools & Deployment ~
- Git
- Gulp
- Grunt
- Babel
- WebPack
- DigitalOcean
- Heroku
- Testing & Quality Control ~
- Chai
- Jasmine
- Mocha
- ESLint
- JSHint
So... What have I learned? I've learned how to learn, fast. The first half of MakerSquare's curriculum is broken up into 'sprints' in which you're tasked with learning and implementing a new piece of technology in a production environment.
Prior to attending MKS, I was a quick learner; however, with the practice and guidance that MakerSquare has provided, I feel confident that I can pick up any new technology and reach a state of proficiency in a matter of days.
At the core, the ability to learn is the ability to recognize patterns while studying, and anticipate those patterns in practice. Thankfully, and largely due to the nature of computer science itself, most libraries follow a similar set of structures and/or design patterns.
Moving Forward...
Currently, I'm nearing the end of the thesis portion of the program. My thesis, working alongside two other developers, is a sentiment analysis and visualization tool. It's been incredibly challenging to develop, but the effort is beginning to pay off.
Feature freeze on the thesis project was this Thursday, so the last week it has been down to the wire implementing the last of our application's functionality. I'm rather happy with the quality of what we have built and am excited to share it with you soon!
Once things begin to wind down and I have more down-time, I'll be sharing the projects I've worked on along with the things I've learned while developing them.
In short, I look forward to posting more regularly in the near future. Until next time. ~Lukas