Learning Journal | Nearsoft Academy | Week 9

November 23— November 30

Hello! 👋 This is my ninth-week takeaways being part of the Nearsoft Academy program, a space to learn, practice, and grow. I’ll post every week, all about the topics I’ve learned during this adventure.

This week, we started a new challenge: The Open Source phase.

during this new phase, we should do some contributions to open source projects, mostly related to our stacks (another big challenge by the way)

Definitely, I learned a lot during this week.

So, should I choose a stack?

Choosing a stack was interesting, I was sure that I love visual things, so frontend was a really good idea, and React was it too, but which could be the second option?

I’m such a hesitant person, so I learned that I need to consider these questions to make a decision:

• What do I like to code?
• What do I like the most?
• How do I see myself in the future?

I love web development so, at the end of the day, it wasn’t so difficult to choose Ruby as a second stack option. I did not know so much about Ruby or Ruby on Rails, but I already started to try it and I’m loving it so far.

So, what is Ruby?

Ruby is a dynamic, open-source programming language, it is focused on offer simplicity and make programmers more productive, it has an elegant syntax and is really easy to read and write.

I used this interactive tutorial to start learning the language.

Ruby on Rails

RoR is a web development framework that uses MVC as its structure, it allows us to write less code and focus on the important. Its philosophy includes these two principles:

DRY. Every piece of knowledge must have a single, unambiguous, authoritative representation within a system.” By not writing the same information over and over again, our code is more maintainable, more extensible, and less buggy.

Rails has opinions about the best way to do many things in a web application, and defaults to this set of conventions, rather than require that you specify minutiae through endless configuration files.

I started with this tutorial on their official documentation, and I was able to create a very simple blog with it.

I have some experience with Laravel (a PHP framework) so I related it with RoR because both frameworks have an MVC architecture.

While doing this small project one of the questions I had about Ruby on Rails was How a rails migration works?

Up to now, it is being easy to build a project with RoR, the next challenge I want to take is to create a Ruby on Rails project using React as frontend.

Open-source projects

These projects are built by the community and for the community, they have a group of people who maintain the project, but anyone can contribute to them.

I need to choose some projects related to my stacks to contribute, so far I choose Material UI since I worked with it in the last phase and I understand some of their issues.

So, how do you want to contribute to the project?

Finding an issue has been more complicated than I tougth, You need to check if anyone has started working on it if it looks appropriate for first contributors, and of course, if you understand at least a little about it.

The issue I took is about useMediaQuery hook, so I decided to start researching how the useMediaQuery hook works.

I still need to find a Ruby open-source project to work on, but i-m excited to learn more about this language.

Now, some about JavaScript

One of the assignments of the week was to answer some specific questions about a language, framework, or library, and one of my questions was about NodeJS, so I also learned more about How ParseInt works?

That was it about this week. The next challenge? Solve some issues, wish me luck!

See you next week.