software development

— UT Austin Full Stack Web Development

I wanted formal training in software development, so I decided to pivot from my consulting career to learn the full stack via UT Austin's web development certification program. The program was 6 months long and ended in Feb 2019. Listed below is the program's curriculum as well as work that so far has taught me the most.
Let me know if you would like a live demo.

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Curriculum

Browser-based Technologies

HTML
CSS
JavaScript
jQuery
Responsive Design

Bootstrap
Handlebars
Cookies, Local Storage
React.js
Vue.js

Server-side Development

MERN Stack

MongoDB
Express.js
React.js
Node.js

Security and Session Storage
User Authentication
C#

ASP.NET

6 month program with about 20 assignments.
3 group projects allow us to practice feature branching and pair programming.

Computer Science Applied to JavaScript

Design Patterns
Algorithms

Deployment

Github Pages
Git
Heroku

Databases

MySQL
Firebase

Quality Assurance

Test Script Development
QA Management

Internet Marketing

SEO
Semantic HTML

guru match
our third team project

Background

I have friends who are freelance therapists and coaches, and common business problems they define are having to constantly self-promote and not having a central marketplace of clients. On the flip side, folks looking for coaches or therapists often are confused by the process and don't know where to start. What if there was a service that helped find coaches suited to your needs? What if coaches could worry less about self-promotion and gain a portal with new clients coming in every week? This is how guru match was born.

The Service

guru match is targeted at clients looking for coaches, whether business, life or fitness coaching. We ask clients to create an account, answer a few questions about who and what their needs are, and then match them with three coaches that already exist on our platform. Clients can then schedule a free 1:1 video session with their coaches when they are ready, and can then decide which coach was best for them. Currently, the way coaches sign up for the service is very similar to how clients sign up. Give the site and video service a shot - maybe you'll find a match!

You can visit the site here.

Poetweet
our second team project

Background

My partner and I thought, how great would it be to create poetry using javascript? How could we use this as an educational tool and encourage young people to create more poetry? Poetweet was born when we decided to use actual tweets from Twitter to create poetry, specifically, haikus.

How it Works

Using the Twitter API and our own haiku-generating logic, we transform tweet strings into a haiku pattern: 5 syllables on the first line, 7 on the second, and 5 on the last. We're storing all newly created poems in a database for later access, and in our next version, sharing them to your own social accounts. We learned Vue.js to build and power the front end.

You can create your own poetry here.

Color Fun
our first team project

Background

My team consisted of two other classmates and myself. The task was to incorporate two APIs, which we had just learned about, as well as a technology new to us. After a series of ideas and prototypes, we landed on Color Fun, a color-matching game for kids.

The Game

Color Fun uses a JS library named Tracking.js which allowed us to learn about color, image and facial features tracking using a device's camera. With this, we decided to build logic where a user needed to find an object in their environment that matched the color displayed on the app. A fun way to teach children about basic colors! We started with magenta, cyan, yellow, red and purple.

You can play the game here.

Guess Hue?
intro to JavaScript

IF statements, arrays, loops and objects. By week 3 into our program, we dove into JavaScript and the challenge was to build a word guess game. Something I learned early on was to give each of my assignments a higher purpose and truly solve problems for myself. The purpose here? Learning the breadth of named colors HTML and CSS has to offer—all 140 up for guessing!

Pseudocoding, trial and error and StackOverflow got me through the logic. As for the game design, I could have used easy hints like "rhymes with" to help the user when guessing. Instead, I decided to use the color itself as a hint. What if we changed the background to reflect the color up for guessing?

That's how Guess Hue? was born. The user can immediately begin typing letters and if their choices are correct, they will see their letters appear in the empty spaces. If they are incorrect, the letters will appear in the 'incorrect letters' section. You can play the game here.

Other work

and thoughts on front end vs. back end

A majority of my experience before this program was front end development. Being able to understand how servers work to optimize performance and how databases house data models has been completely empowering.

Below are a few concepts I recently learned. Hope to bring more work for you to see!

Node.js

A run-time environment isn't the easiest concept to grasp, but after working on our "liri" app, I became much more comfortable. The task was to build a command line application that took 4 commands: spotify a song, find a concert, find a movie or create a new command. This assignment also took us away from the browser completely for the first time!

MySQL

We created "bamazon," a rip on, well you know! We had to create an inventory and then attach commands based on various personas: a customer and a manager. This was again, a pure command line application. I really enjoyed learning MySQL for storing and querying data as it was the first time I felt I understood the complexity of data models.

Express.js

We started learning about API and HTML routes from the ground up. Express was a gift after having to type out complex routing structures. In the assignment above, we needed to build a form that took responses from multiple users and then determine their most compatible match from all users. I themed mine off of memes created by the Instagram account @notallgeminis.