Forem: Bertrand Chevalier

Why I attended a coding bootcamp

Bertrand Chevalier — Fri, 30 Nov 2018 00:07:52 +0000

After 8 months of hard work, I'm finally there - about to graduate from my coding bootcamp. So now, what?

Flashback:

At around 18 years old, I attended an engineering school back in France. This is where I had my first experience coding. I was never really exposed to it before.
The least I can say is that experience was not very conclusive. It was almost 15 years ago and most memories are a bit fuzzy but what I do remember is how abstract it was.
We were asked to build some functions that will return some values. Hum... ok. and so? what happened? As you know, when you return a value, nothing is printed, you do not see the result of your function. This is exactly where I got lost. I needed to see what happened.
A few classes of physics and months after, my decision was made. I'll study economics and finance instead of engineering.

Fast forward 3 years:

I am now working towards my masters degree in Finance and as all finance students I need to be proefficient in Excel and part of my curriculum are dedicated lessons which extend to VBA and C.
This is the moment I became conscious of the power of programming. VBA is actually extremely visual. What ever code you write you see the changes in your spreadsheet. It's AWESOME. I love it! (I loved seeing the changes so much that I was initially using the spreadsheets as arrays so I could see even more changes...) In my group of friends, I become the "coding guy". Taking care of the programming aspect of projects (options pricer, stock market simulation etc).

Fast forward 11 years (roughly 8 months ago):

I am now working as a consultant in Finance, barely doing any coding. Over the years, I took a bunch of online tutorials and MOOC to teach myself. I understand the basics of object-oriented programming, almost got fired from an internship for programming a Christmas tree with decoration which changes color on Excel and recently moved to New-York City for work.
Coming from France, I discover a brand new world in New-York City. People have 20 side businesses, they keep learning new things and one very trendy thing to learn is coding. To answer for this demand, bootcamps are here and that's exactly what I did.

Current times:

It's been 8 months, I finished my online bootcamp, I "know" how to build a website. And so now, what?

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Notes:
This article is the first of two. The second one reflects on the learning experience during the bootcamp and start to answer the "so now, what?". Please find it here
This article was originally posted on 9/29/2018

Redux cheatsheet: the different components and their role

Bertrand Chevalier — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 23:52:26 +0000

Redux has been a real challenge to me when I first approached it.
It is pretty confusing as the abstraction level is pretty advanced given how it is set up. I believe that a better understanding of all the components and their role would have helped me out a lot.
So please see my attempt to explain that.

Why Redux?

The official documentation explains it very clearly. Redux works around 3 principles:

Implementing a single source of truth. The state of your whole application is stored in an object tree within a single store.
Read-only state. The only way to change the state is to emit an action, an object describing what happened.
Changes through pure functions only. _To specify how the state tree is transformed by actions, you write pure reducers.

Store, reducer, actions? What are those and how do they work exactly?

React-Redux:

Role: Allow the React and Redux to communicate properly. Indeed Redux is not a React dedicated library and can work with other frameworks (Angular.js and others).
Type: Library
Where: It will be used at multiple places. In your compenents where you access the store through the connect() function (c.f.: below). At the higher level of your app where you will use the component (c.f.: below).

Actions:

Role: Operations that will be done on a state with the purpose of modifying it.
Type: Javascript Object. It's important. Actions are only Javascript #object
Where: It can be defined pretty much anywhere. Best practices are to define them in a dedicated folder with a name relating to the reducer they will work with

reducers():

Role: Function that will effectively change the state based on an action
Type: Function
- Return values: The updated state following an action. ___The reducer should never return undefined. As such, the reducer should always have a default return value of the current state
Where: Usually in a dedicated folder that will group all the reducers of the app together

combineReducer:

Role: Allow to combine multiple reducers into one and having to pass only the combined reducer in the store. It mainly allows writing multiple reducers following the separation of concerns instead of a big messy reducer including all the actions needed for the app
Type: Function
Where: In the folder dedicated to the reducers

dispatch():

Role:
1. Persist the changes to the state (non-destructively)
2. Re-render the DOM with a new state following an action
Type: Function!
- Return values: None.
Where: In the Redux library! No need to define it in your application!

Store:

Role: Contains the state
Type: Object that contains the state of the application and has access to 2 functions:
- The dispatch function: which dispatch changes to the state (given a specific action) and re-render the DOM
- A getState function: Which allows accessing the state
Where: Usually at the highest possible level of your app so its entierty has access to it (index.js seems a good choice in a create-react-app)

createStore():

Role: Will assign a store to a variable
Type: Function that will take a reducer as an argument which will be used to define the associated dispatch function (i.e.: by giving a reducer as an argument to the createStore function, it will allow your app to know to which reducer will your action be dispatched )
Where: The function is defined in the Redux library. You will, however, call it in your app to create the store. With the use of the combineReducer function, you usually call the createStore() function only once in your app.

Provider:

Role: Wrap the main level component of your app and passes the store as a prop. The provider will alert the Redux app when a change to the state has been made and will re-render the React app
Type: Component
Where: The component will be used at the highest level of your app to wrap it.

connect():

Role: Allow a component to get data from the store's internal state, send new data to the store's internal state and to re-render. The connect function returns a component that looks like the component it is tied to but with acess to the right data. Please note that if you have only one argument in your connect function you will have access to a dispatch function by default.
Type: Function
Where: You will use this function in each component where you need to access the store's internal state (read or write)

mapStateToProps():

Role: Allow to specify which part of the store's state we need to provide to our component and allow to access to them through a given prop. mapStateToProps is executed for each change to the store's state
Type: Function
Where: This function is defined by the user in each component where we need to access the state

mapDispatchToProps():

Role: Allow to access action creators through the component's props. mapDispatchToProps() takes the dispatch function as an argument allowing to dispatch the actions to the reducer
Type: Function
Where: This function is defined by the user in each component where we need to access the state

What do you want to see on a portfolio website?

Bertrand Chevalier — Thu, 11 Oct 2018 01:12:41 +0000

I recently developed my very own and first portfolio website (feel free to stop by and provide some comments!). The first objective I’m trying to achieve with it is to start building an online presence. As such, the website remains basic (React front-end only) and only displays some information about me as well as some links towards my various social network accounts (including Dev.to!)
A lot of web developers have their personal website. As such, I wanted to differentiate myself as much as possible with the means I have. To do so I hid some Easter eggs throughout the website for one to find (let me know if you found them - others will come). In addition to differentiating my website from others, it also allows to showcase some technical skills (React components management, Redux management, framework application such as react-bootstrap and other relevant libraries – react-router-dom).
I am however aware that hiding some Easter eggs is not enough and I am therefore wondering: what should be on a portfolio website?
While building mine, I have chosen to include the following sections:

Home: Just to greet people, this section presents myself in one line (three given the font size) and invite people to explore the website more.
Portfolio: According to me, this is the most import part of the website and which displays all the projects I worked on (websites developments, scripts and other programs needed). While still under development while I write those words, I want to bring great attention to it.
Contact: The obvious, social media links and email so people can reach out to me.
About: A few words about me and what I do and what I aspire in life

As next steps, I would like to include direct access to my blog. For now, I write exclusively on Dev.to, because of the great community (thank you guys 😉). I however believe there is currently no possibilities to integrate Dev.to posts in our personal website. Developing one from scratch seems therefore a great challenge and a good solution (front end, back end, integration to other social networks). But besides that…
This is where I need you. As there is a bunch of seasoned developers and hiring managers here. What would you expect to see as part of a personal website? Is it something important that you would check before hiring a developer? If so, what would, in the most concise way, would convince you of interviewing/hiring the candidate?

Please let me know your thoughts. I know that as a recent graduate from a bootcamp, a lot of developers would be interested by your point of view.

What did I learn during a coding bootcamp

Bertrand Chevalier — Sun, 30 Sep 2018 18:58:15 +0000

Note: This article is the second part of a previous article. You should start by reading the first part which comes back on why I attended a bootcamp. Please find it here.

So I'm done. That's it. Time to reflect on what I did and what can I do with it.

What did I learn?

This one is easy! I learned some programing languages: Ruby, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SQL, React. But I also learned some frameworks: Ruby on rails, ActiveRecord, Bootstrap, Redux, Sinatra, etc...

Is it that easy though? No. I learned much more. Reflecting on those 8 months, I can now say that I learned much more than just some technical skills. If I want to sum it up, I would classify my learning in 3 different buckets:

Technical skills (the obvious)
Programming Mindset (the must-have)
Personal strengths and weaknesses (the cherry on top of the cake)

Technical skills

As briefly mentioned, during the bootcamp, I learned a bunch of different programming languages and frameworks. I, however, believe that this might be the less important part of the curriculum.
The most important concept of curriculum is the learning path: learn from the ground up. From the lowest level to the highest which aim at explaining how everything works.

To illustrate that, one simple example:
In ruby, what does attr_accessor :name do? Well, it's important to know that under the hood, this simple line of code actually provides two methods:

        def name=(name) 
            @name = name 
        end

        def name
           @name
        end

The entire curriculum works this way - we start by building the lower level functionality to introduce higher-level ways of doing things such as frameworks. There are multiple benefits to this approach but the biggest one is that by doing so, you understand how everything works together and allows you to be much more creative when programming. This is critical as this is what programming is. You leverage pieces of code wrote by other programmers. While it is possible to leverage them without understanding how it works under the hood, having this understanding helps tremendously. This is a first glimpse in the programming mindset.

Programming Mindset

The bootcamp promote problem-solving through multiple projects, where you have to "make things work". This, combined to the ground-up approach, without explicitly saying it gives a programming mindset.
While I'm still a beginner, I understand there are two big phases to learning to program. Understand how it works by leveraging pieces of codes built by others and then, take off the training wheels, and start building new stuff.

I strongly believe that both the problem-solving skills and the deep understanding of the logic of codings are key to be able to keep growing. One will understand that learning to code is actually learning how to figure out stuff.
For that, you need a technical background to understand the technology and problem-solving capabilities to add to what already exists.

Very tied to the technical knowledge, I believe the bootcamp also brings an understanding of why best practices and conventions are key, when developing alone, but even more as part of a team. Who said missing an "s" (or having an extra one...) could have a lot of consequences when using ActiveRecord?

Personal strengths and weaknesses

Finally, during the process, I learned a lot about myself. I won't get into too much details here as that's not really the purpose, but that was an important one.
I used to think I was fairly advanced in programming because I was "first in class" of a non-programmer class... The first thing I understood is how little I know... I basically know... NOTHING. But that's ok. I have the rest of my life to learn.
For that I will try to develop habits to keep improving (more to come in a dedicated article).

And so now, what?

Now, well, I "know how to figure stuff out". Next steps for me are easy:

Keeping improving on my coding skills by working on several different aspects (more to come as said above ;) )
Explore what exists and find what I want to focus on. The cool part about coding is that it allows you to do so much different things. Web-development, Game development, Blockchain, AI, Digital art, Data analysis and visualization. I already know I love programming, know I want to know what I love programming. I will more than definitely keep you updated on my progress on those aspects!

Thanks for reading!

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