Progress, Thoughts, and Reflections
Serverside Finale - 11 April 2025
Finished Lab 12.1 which covered PHP session management/parameters: reflecting back at my journey through 1XD3 and all the skills and concepts I've learned, I think the most relevant is the server-side "backend", which includes SQL and PHP, and the most fun was the client-side JavaScript, such as the JavaScript assignment. By understanding the basics of how PHP and MariaDB work and hosting on an Apache server, I can now easily learn other popular back-end frameworks such as NodeJS or Flask for and then deploy my web app projects online. On the other hand, JavaScript's creativity especially with the HTML Canvas was very interesting. I can definitley see what I've learned to build a career in web dev but I'd be open to other software engineering fields. In the future, some topics I'd like to learn and get a deeper understanding of is front-end libraries/frameworks such as React/Angular/Vue/Bootstrap as well as cybersecurity.
Serverside Intro - 10 March 2025
Finished Lab 9.1 and I find the serverside scripting to be a little more rewarding than the client side even though I'm just starting out and haven't seen the full potential of it yet, because even though it's less immediately rewarding, its interesting especially having done cybersecurity competitions where I've done SQL injections and web exploits on the backend. I think the most important role of this server-side scripting in a fullstack web app is providing a custom experience to each user and reading from the database (in this case, PHP), while the most important role of client-side scripting is to handle user interaction on the website, particularly changing the DOM.
Client Side finale - 3 March 2025
Finished Lab 7.1 and I have to say, of all these new concepts, I found the most challenging thing to work with was DOM manipulation while objects was the easiest, probably because I have used localstorage before but not manipulating the DOM in response to events. Of these concepts, I think the most fundamental to my career as a computer scientist is objects and classes given that OOP is applicable in numerous programming languages besides JavaScript, e.g. Java. Getting a refresher of Objects and classes is nice considering I am taking OOP courses in upper years.
Javascript Progress - 3 Feb. 2025
Lab 5.1. I like JavaScript's syntax so far and client-side programming so far, presumably a lot better than Elm. Harnessing my previous programming experience which actually includes JS was really helpful to get going. The most surprising thing is how intuitive it is, down to the small details like a function declaration being named function rather than def in Python. Lastly I would say that the most challenging thing in JS is memorizing the boiler plate code which I am not used to in Python, i.e. including the window listener.
Responsive Progress - 20 Jan. 2025
Hey there how's it going, I'm very happy with this updated design of my portfolio. To make it better I wanna add JavaScript elements and animatons to make the page feel livlier, such as a custom cursor, and maybe make the index page social media links easier to see by putting them in a colored box. Overall, I'm getting fairly comfortable with the design aspect of websitess now, and looking towards the rest of the course, I'm hoping to learn the back-end and how to apply JS.
1st journal entry - 13 Jan. 2025
Hello, I attended the DeltaHacks XI hackathon this weekend, hosted at McMaster, and exposed to a lot of web dev beyond this course (React, ExpressJS, Flask, etc.), and other languages and technologies. Our team's project was a printable guitar that used computer vision and inputted our own training dataset to help anyone, anywhere, learn the guitar without spending $200-300 on a real guitar. In just 24 hours (actually 12 after sleeping for 7 hours) I gained experience trying to host our site on Netlify, and although our "backend" machine learning and "frontend" website worked, due to an error I wasn't able to deploy. Now onto the present, I love that 1XD3 is now taught in JavaScript instead of Elm and I also like Dr. Scott and his textbook. I have prior experience with JavaScript, having taught children game development in it as my part-time job.