Sanitising


No, I'm not talking about handwashing here, we've heard enough about that Covid, thank you very much!  I'm talking databases and sanitising your input.  We are now at the point of creating full stack web apps. This means that we have a fully functioning 'back end' as well as a nice user interface at the front end!  We're learning all about relational databases and the importance of making sure that our inputs to the database are sanitised to prevent any sql injection attacks.


RESTful routes


Woo hoo!! Today we made our first fully functioning full stack web app!  Yep, I think it's fair to say we're all pretty happy with ourselves!  I've had so much advice in the 3.5 weeks, telling me not to worry, it will all fall into place...well today ladies and gentlemen was the day.  I finally have my head around routing, RESTful routes to be precise.  REST stands for Representational State Transfer.  There are 7 RESTful routes and they map between our HTTP methods (GET, POST etc) and our CRUD actions (Create, Read, Update, Delete).  Long story short our RESTful routes can collect information from our database and display it on our web app.

Font Awesome


Well, I couldn't not mention fontawesome.com!  I hadn't heard of it before today - sure I had downloaded and used some google fonts in previous projects, but I didn't know that all those cool symbols you find on web sites can be downloaded from Font Awesome.  All I have to do now is restrain myself during project week...!




The Project!

Well this is what we've all been building up to for the past nearly 4 weeks! Our first solo full stack project!  The weekend homework's pale in comparison! We were given 6 different briefs to chose from. I have chosen a Travel bucketlist app where users can save different attractions, cities and countries they would like to visit.  They will be able to mark these places as visited as and when they go there and write some notes too.  I've got a few other ideas up my sleeve but I want to get the app up and running first then if I have 'spare time' (I've forgotten what that is since starting this course but I'm hopeful!) I can add some nice extras in.  

I spent a full day planning, drawing out the class tables and doing UX research.  Even with a simple app it's amazing what you can learn from doing a simple wireframe (this time I borrowed the kids colouring in pencils and used blue tack to move the buttons and pages around - I'm hoping for more of that spare time to get to grips with Figma). I tried my wireframe out on the other half and asked him to carry out a simple task on the app, straight away I could see a better way of making things clearer for the user.

We were also recommended a useful tool - Trello, which I'm using to manage my project.  It's really easy to use and you can clearly colour code your tasks according to the MoSCoW method (a prioritisation technique where you decide what your project Must have, Should have, Could have and Won't have).  The best part though is moving each task from the 'To Do' board across to the 'Doing' board and finally to the 'Done' board!!

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