Instructor: Dion Ridley
This session will be broken into two parts:
In this part Dion will discuss his career in tech and the various roles and choices he made to navigate the tech field to get where he is today. We will cover:
- Education level entering the tech field
- Dion's career path
- Advancing your career outside of work (relationships, meetups, voluntering, community)
- Various roles available in tech
- Q & A
In the tech field the ability to quickly learn and pick up new technology is critical for keeping up and advancing in the field. In this part of the class we will give a brief intro into node.js and then dive into coding and learning hands on. This intro will narrowly focus on using the technology to build an API server. Students will be able to continue this project after this session to build an API server to make data from their app publicly available.
This session will cover:
- Basics of Node.js
- Non-blocking code and async programming (callbacks)
- Basics of API design (REST, methods, versioning, etc)
- npm (Node Package Manager)
- express.js (a web server framework)
- Building an API server with static data
- Discuss: Long running apps, live relaod, etc ( http://nodemon.io/ )
- Discuss: Hosting on your own vs. providers
- Q & A
- Stretch Goal: Connecting to external database and services
- Stretch Goal: Live debugging with Chrome Tools
The following tools will be needed for this session:
- A text editor for editing javascript. ( http://www.sublimetext.com/ )
- A tool for calling and debugging api. ( https://www.getpostman.com/ )
- Latest version of Node.js. ( https://nodejs.org )
- faker.js - generate fake data ( http://marak.com/faker.js/ )
- Nodemon - process monitor for node ( http://nodemon.io/ )
- moment.js - great library for handling dates and time ( http://momentjs.com/ )
- underscore.js - great library of utility functions for object and array ( http://underscorejs.org/ )
- node-inspector - debug tool for node.js ( https://github.com/node-inspector/node-inspector )
- What are callbacks? - https://docs.nodejitsu.com/articles/getting-started/control-flow/what-are-callbacks
- Javascript Basics - http://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-basics
- Javascript Loops, Arrays and Objects - http://teamtreehouse.com/library/javascript-loops-arrays-and-objects
- Object-Oriented Javascript - http://teamtreehouse.com/library/objectoriented-javascript
- Node.js Basics - http://teamtreehouse.com/library/nodejs-basics