Den Chou

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The Budget Calendar is my most ambitious project to date. It was built using new frameworks: React.js, JSX, Axios using Ruby on Rails, ActiveRecord and PSQL for the back-end. Despite having worked with MongoDB and Express.js in prior projects, I thought the Ruby on Rails api had better documentation and the right relational database I need to craft a budget calendar. of great methods for date manipulation. Moment.js and fnDates were some of the few I read, I ended up turning to fnDates due to better documentation provided.

Thinking in React took awhile and though I am not fluent in it yet, I'd love to play with it more. I chose an app that reminded me of my old days as a Client Manager. A lot of my clients were asking us to build them a budget calendar for their students and our development team never had the time or resource to do it. Having completed the fully functional budget calendar when I had only 4 days to learn React and 4 days to create it gave me a euphoric feeling of accomplishment, even if it was after the fact, I was having a moment. Looking forward to many more moments to come.

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The Bag of Holding was my very first project working in a team setting. Our objective was to create a web app similar to DropBox, using Amazon AWS S3 service as an endpoint for user's file storage and uploads. It was the first web app where we used MongoDB, Mongoose, and Express.js as the back-end. The front-end was built using Bootstrap, Javascript, JQuery/AJAX, and SASS.

I learned a lot with this project. We started by researching the scrum team model assigning each other roles, with me being scrum lead. At first there were a few encounters with git merge conflicts but we were able to come together to resolve the issues. I enjoyed the group dynamic and was able to assist in all aspect of the project by being a floating coder where I jump in to assist with either front-end or back-end, whether it's to create the Handlebars or figure out MimeType, coding wherever neccessary to produce a Minimal Viable Product(MVP).

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I had the idea of creating Your Opinion as a web app after enjoying some hilarious memes where people post photos of reviews on just about anything you can imagine. So I decided, why not make an app for that? This was my first SPA where I had to build the front-end along with the back-end. I used Javascript, JQuery, Bootstrap 4, Handlebars, HTML5 and SASS for my front-end. The back-end API was built with Ruby on Rails using Active Record and PSQL.

I spent roughly two weeks learning Ruby and Rails. Once it was time to code, I hit the ground running creating all my resources in the back end. Even though this was my first app using Rails and I was amazed and how east, and dangerous, ActiveRecord could be. Most of my time was spent building the front end. I had just learned about a tool called Handlebars which helped resolve some Cross-Site Scripting woes.

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Tic-Tac-Toe was my first ever attempt at creating a Single-Page application(SPA). The goal was to create a fully functional Tic-Tac-Toe game as an SPA using authentication. The frontend was built using Javascript, JQuery, Bootstrap 3, HTML5, and CSS3. Coming from a Computer Science background, creating the logic for Tic-Tac-Toe was the easier part.

It took me awhile to wrap my head around manipulating the DOM using JQuery. Whenever a problem took too long, I resort to googling for solutions -- most of the time it was merely a syntax issue. I had a lot of fun adding in additional features and easter eggs in the end.