Forem: Brighton Smith

[Flatiron SE] Day 100: 12/06/24

Brighton Smith — Fri, 06 Dec 2024 15:31:16 +0000

Howdy yall,

Its officially the last day of flatiron for me. I have just finished my main project. It was definitely a struggle but I'm so happy I was even able to figure it out all on my own. And I'm very excited to see where this takes me.

Just to go through my project really quick. Its basically a "build creator" for a game. Just a simple front and back end app with simple functionality. I did learn to use shortuuid to create codes to be able to share builds. But other than that its a relatively normal project.

But once again id like to thank my instructor and everyone at flatiron for this opportunity.

Signing off,
Matthew Brighton Smith

[Flatiron SE] Day 70: 11/06/24

Brighton Smith — Wed, 06 Nov 2024 21:49:40 +0000

Hey everyone, back again. Just getting caught up on my blog posts. Just about nearing the end of Phase 4. Pretty crazy to imagine that flatiron is almost over, incredibly surreal. Whelp best I get started.

The main thing we focused on this phase was Flask. Flask is a flexible web framework for Python that makes building web applications WAY more simple. It provides an easy way to start with essential tools and components, allowing me to create and scale applications a lot faster than just using python. One of the most remarkable things about Flask is its ability to simplify Python, making it a super useful choice for me so I can focus on functionality without getting bogged down by unnecessary complexity. Personally, I find this simplicity incredibly useful and am excited to keep exploring Flask’s potential in professional projects.

[Flatiron SE] Day 44: 10/11/24

Brighton Smith — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 19:10:31 +0000

Howdy yall! Back again for another blog.

Things have been moving fast. But I'm officially in phase 3 of the program! And in this phase were learning all about Python.

I already knew a bit about python, so this was just solidifying my skills.

What I like about python the most, is its very math based. Feels great to work in. And the object system and callback systems feel amazing.

We've only really learned the basics of loops and such, but today we learned a lot about data structure and how they are based used to store information.

Ill try my best to update this blog with more info as I learn more about python.

[Flatiron SE] Day 20: 09/19/24

Brighton Smith — Fri, 20 Sep 2024 00:32:19 +0000

Woof Hi yall.

Been a while, had a bit of a rough streak since the 30th and have not been able to make a blog post. But im back and I can now talk about a cool new Java component ive been learning!

REACT

So ive just now been learning react recently, and have been enjoying it a ton. To me it feels alot better then normal java because it allows for more easily seeing how everything is structure in my code. And I have been able to make some very useful bits of code with it. We are only really learning the basics right now.

Like props, components, states, etc. But I promise to update the blog again soon with everything ive learned!

[Flatiron SE] Day 3: 08/30/24

Brighton Smith — Sat, 31 Aug 2024 00:39:20 +0000

Howdy everyone! Feesh here!

Today was very eventful when it came to learning for me! So lets just jump straight in!

Server Access

I learned a lot more about server side stuff. Especially when it came to DOM and JSON! But it wasn't the main focus of today. But I definitely didn't struggle on it like yesterday.

Array Iteration

This was the big learning topic of today. I learned a bit more about for loops, but I learned a ton about Integer Modifiers. The three were,

Find(), Filter(), Map()

They are all different ways of iterating through a array, but all accomplish different tasks. Find() will look through a array and find a specific value in the array. Filter() will look through the array and find multiple values that match the value. And Map() will go through the array and output a new array of the same length with changes. Which I found to be the most useful of the three.

That was about everything important I learned today, I did struggle pretty hard on some labs. But that is when I took the time to realize...

I don't need to know everything, especially when I am first starting out. So that really helped me slow down and figure the problem out. I am just very excited to get started on the journey!

So once again thank you to everyone that supported me!

Bye y'all!

[Flatiron SE] Day 2: 08/29/24

Brighton Smith — Thu, 29 Aug 2024 20:17:06 +0000

Howdy everyone! Feesh back again!

Today was a very interesting day. I learned many things that were completely new to me, which is gonna be very helpful! Even though I did struggle a bit of some of them, I was able to figure it out in the end with the help of my instructor and my fellow students!

For Looping

I did already know a bit about "For Each" looping, but "For Of" and "For In" were very new, how ever they weren't that complicated. For Of was just used as a simple way to iterate over iterables like so...

for (variable of iterable) {
  // code block to be executed
}

...very simple. And For In was a bit more complicated, letting you also control enumerable objects. It was very hard for me to wrap my head around.

Communicating with the Server

Now this was the big one, I officially got to learn how to use servers to send and control data. The most useful use I got out of this was learning how people access publicly available API's (huge one for me because I LOVE data). I will say, I really really struggled with fetch() for some reason. I eventually figured it out, I was just struggling with how it interacted within a function.

To explain, usually you can run Fetch() in the console of a website via this command...

fetch("url to a api database")

...but I was just not able to understand how to do it. I did end up finding out it works just like above, I was just overthinking the process. Which is a pretty silly issue I have. But I'm glad I figured it out!

Big O Notation

Last thing I want to talk about is Big O Notation. This was super interesting to me just because of all the different ways to optimize code and the best way to do it. After learning more about it I decided to do my own research and it seems like Big O Notation is incredibly important in any coding scenario. So I will be sure to make sure I can use it to optimize when ever possible.

Here's a pretty cool chart I found to visualize it!

[Source:https://www.bigocheatsheet.com]

But thats everything for today! Once again thank you to Flatiron and everyone that supports me!

Cya!

[Flatiron SE] Day 1: 08/28/24

Brighton Smith — Wed, 28 Aug 2024 18:11:32 +0000

Howdy y'all, Feesh here,

This will just be my first ever blog post! I am doing this from the request of my amazing instructor over at Flatiron School. I will be attempting to make a blog post each day documenting my development through my coding journey. And HELLO and WELCOME and employers reading this in the future!

Now I need to be honest, this is not actually my "first day" of flatiron. I actually started two days ago on Monday. But I believe today was absolutely the day where I really got invested in what I am learning.

Speaking of, lets get into what I learned today! I wont be going over everything, just the things that intrigued me the most.

Event Listeners

I officially learned about JavaScript's most exciting feature... EVENT LISTENERS. My original language I was learning before this was C# which shares some similarity's, but really helped me understand the concept better. Lets take two examples so I can explain what I mean with a simple keydown for both Java and C#.

JavaScript

addEventListener("keydown", (event) => {});

onkeydown = (event) => {};

void Update()
    {
        if (Input.GetKeyDown("space"))
        {
            Debug.Log("space key was pressed");
        }
    }

Now looking at both of them I can start to see the difference between them. Like how C# needs a constant update to look for commands while Java does not, quite interesting.

Work Place Practice

One of the more smaller things I enjoyed doing today was practicing how a workspace job would go. I was giving a website with a form and submit button. And I was basically told...

As a user, I should be able to type a task into the input field.
As a user, I should be able to click some form of a submit button.
As a user, I expect to see the task string that I provided appear in the DOM after the submit button has been activated.

And I had to adapt and make theses requests with the skills I learned prior. Very exciting!

But that's about everything I felt was unique to my learning journey. Thank you to the folks at Flatiron for the great opportunity. See yall tomorrow 👋

[Flatiron SE] Day 1: 08/27/24