Side Project Skill Creep
In between completing my Master's, I spent a lot of time working on side-projects. When I look back over the year, I realized each side-project taught me new skills, like building blocks paving the foundation for the next one. The best way improve in coding is to build something and I did just that.
Here's how it went:
1) HanziJS: Request/Posts & Jade Templating
HanziJS, the open-source project, started before the site itself. I wanted to decompose Chinese characters for my research, so I thought why not make this available to other users. I posted it on reddit and got some great feedback, but one comment was specifically about how the site worked.
My total newbie self, created the channel between the front-end and back-end via websockets (Now.js), which was completely overkill for this type of project. I quickly learned about post/get requests. Epic facepalm moment there.
The reason I did websockets was because I wasn't sure how to embed data from Node.js from the backend into the front-end. So I learned Jade templating as well.
2) dotJunky: Sending Emails & Forms
Althought dotJunky is closed now (more on that later), I had to learn how to send emails using Node.js. I picked up the mailer module and quickly learned how to send emails. I used SendGrid on Heroku.
I had to get email addresses via forms though. I had trouble at first as to how ExpressJS handled forms, but after a day or two I figured it out.
3) Chinese character experiments: Better Javascript data structures
Although not a side-project, out of curiosity I created an experiment on Confused Laowai. I did a laborious 4 levels deep for loop through whole Chinese character dictionaries and the like. It was slow. Really slow.
With 50 characters the project ran for 7 hours!
I was absolutely absorbed for the next few days trying to make it more efficient. Lo and behold I found dictionary structures. I don't know why I never used this before. I'm a noob I know! Before I just iterated over the WHOLE array of over 100, 000 entries every single time I did a lookup to find a potential word in the Chinese dictionary.
I used this knowledge to improve HanziJS tremendously.
4) Polyglot Link: User Logins & MongoDB & Feed Parsing
Polyglot Link is a directory for language learning blogs. At first I wanted to create a flat html directory as an MVP, but then I realized this would just create more hassle down the line. So I decided to learn how to use MongoDB. It was actually quite easy in it the end! I used Mongoose as middleware.
However, now that I used MongoDB, I needed a way to work with the data in an easy way, because I have to moderate new blog submissions. Therefore, I created an admin section, but anyone could access it. Woops, user login time!
I used Passport as my framework. I must admit, I scratched my head numerous times trying to figure how this works: sessions, authentication and more.
I did one more thing thanks to the ease of Node.js modules. I hashed my password using node.bcrypt.js! Safety first.
After some time I added a feed that parses all the blogs listed on the site. I did this by creating a public Google reader folder and using node-feedparser.
5) HanziCraft: Paypal Payments and Improved User Management
HanziCraft is an improved version of HanziJS. I'll do a blog post about that in the near future. I had to improve the user management system I created in Polyglot Link to allow for user creation and multiple users.
Furthermore I wanted to implement paid-for premium features. Paypal was my only option due to South African regulations and options. I spent numerous days researching options. In the end I created a nice workflow using Paypal's IPN feature. This was integrated with the user creation process. I sent emails too using the knowledge I learned from dotJunky.
It all adds up
In the end it all adds up. I was lucky that each side project taught me something new, especially in such a linear manner. Each project built on the knowledge of the previous one.
I'm sure my coding is still terribly inefficient, but I've come a long way since the start of the year. If you want to learn just create!
Pic: Source