A curious discovery led me down a weird rabbit hole of confusion — Blogging is new to me Until this last year, I primarily wrote my thoughts down the old school way, in pen on paper. After enrolling and completing a coding bootcamp however, I found blogging to be a way of reinforcing my learning and as a way to open up and express who I am behind…

Where it all began, how/why I decided to change careers during a global crisis, and where I am today — My motivation and origin story First, let me introduce myself. I am who I am today because I grew up alongside the modern web. At the age of 7, my life dramatically changed when visiting one of my favorite gaming websites, Miniclip. I saw a new advertisement at the top that read RuneScape. It was…

My experience with a loaded, and somewhat uncomfortable term, and why it doesn’t have to be so bad — What is Networking? If you are a recent graduate of a coding bootcamp, you have probably been given an overwhelming amount of advice to start networking. At first read networking may make you feel really bad. You may think you are being tasked with randomly emailing strangers desperately asking for help. You may…

Resources to start unit testing React applications with the latest tools such as Jest and react-testing-library — I recently started an exciting side project with my two best friends! One of my friends is a seasoned web developer, turned SCRUM Master, who we will reference as ‘B’. My other friend, ‘R’, is a self-taught JavaScript developer who is interested in learning React. I am a React enthusiast…

How to find, develop and make your first pull request, and become a contributing member of an open source project — What is Open Source? Open Source Software (OSS) can be defined as any software that has been released for the purposes of giving other people the rights to study, use, change, contribute to, and distribute the software. …

Exploring use cases, and how I recently fell in love with Next — If you are interested in frontend software development, you have probably heard of React. However, if you are new or newer, React is a JavaScript library that was built to create beautiful UI components. Most programmers add additional libraries to their React applications, and each of the frameworks in the…

A closer look at the linear data structure — Singly Linked List A linked lists is a linear data structure that consists of units of data (nodes) that are chained together and implemented through storing information as well as holding reference to other nodes. In the above image, the number 5 is the head of our linked list. The right half of…

An introduction to data structures and abstract data types — What are data structures? In computer science, data structures are particular formats utilized in the organization, management, and processing of data. There are many data structures that vary greatly in complexity. Essentially, a data structure exists to store information while creating a pathway to retrieve and use that information efficiently. …

Creating, submitting, and appending content without refreshing the webpage — While working on a new Rails project, I was tasked with creating a comment model and implementing the ability to add comments to a video’s show page. I needed to be able to access both the video and comment models, add comments to the video page, display newly added comments…