It has marked just over a year since I’ve picked up a keyboard to transition into the magical world of software engineering and it’s been a humbling experience so far. This year, I’ve started a job with a company that uses Java which forces me to learn it.

Here is my biggest caveat with Java and I don’t know if I’m in the minority here for this but Java is so explicit. Unlike Javascript where you can define a variable and then initialize it to whatever datatype, java requires datatype initializing. Whats that mean? Take a look below.

Javascript 
let…

Before you read this blog, I highly recommend reading ‘Testing with Jest’ as this is a follow up! These are the last steps before I complete my Task Manager App!

In the previous blog, we started testing some example problems for the app but now we need to make sure that our endpoints work as expected. You should consider what endpoints require authentications and which don’t. Test both cases, whether a user is authenticated and whether they aren’t.

Before we start, let’s breakdown what we’re doing. Right now, I’m in my local production. When running ‘npm run test’, I’m actually…

Recently, I’ve completed working on an API using Node, Express, and MongoDB. Testing would require me to open up Postman to test that my users can login, see their information, upload their photos, and it all just felt very manual. I thought it would be a great way to start looking into testing on my application.

Jest is a javascript framework to ensure the correctness of your application. If you had a function in your codebase that took the sum of two numbers, how would you make sure that the function is working as intended?

const sum = (num1, num2)…

One things that I’ve always thought about as I scroll through my Instagram feed is, how is this information so endless. As I build out my own application, I realized that this isn’t a new feature. It’s been there since the beginning. When we google something, we get millions of results and yet it’s only showing the ten most relevant articles to our search on the first page.

In my journey to create an app that feels as real as any other application, I started to search how people only show the first couple of products as oppose to the…

This past month, I’ve been prioritizing Data Structure and Algorithms. Thankfully, when it comes to frontend development, I’ve been practicing on my mentors’ company website. Today I was doing a leetcode problem to prepare me for some job interviews and I’ve been getting better at them, thankfully, but I always forget to use Sets! This particular question, I used a hash table but then realized that I’d probably be best using a set, so let’s dive into it.

Leetcode 1436: Destination City

The Problem: You are given an array ‘paths’, where paths[i] = [‘cityA’, cityB] which means that there exists a path outgoing cityA…

During my time in college, I had this co-op with a big company within the refrigeration industry. Although it was a great learning experience, it was not as hands on as I expected it to be. I wanted to use hardware but my team and I were left using an HVAC design software. It was great but I felt like I missed out on something valuable.

I’m currently interning at a small collective where I work as a Research Associate and Software Engineer. Unlike the co-op, this is a very hands on environment and I love it. …

Responsive design refers to the ability for a website to adjust according to a different screen sizes. An app that looks beautiful on your laptop should look just as beautiful on your phone. In creating a responsiveness design, you avoid the need to re-create an application for your phone with different code.

Responsive design is accomplished through CSS ‘media queries’ and it almost like conditionally rendering a different layout based on the users device.

As I dive into the code for the company I’m interning with, I’ve been more and more excited to dive into frontend development. Unfortunately I came across a road block because as I cloned the repo and tried to run locally, I got an error that was referring me back to the sass file used to style components.

$spec-black: #222525
^
      Media query expression must begin with '('
      in /Users/johnsonkow/Development/SPEC/SPECwebsite/specollective.org/src/components/all.sass (line 8, column 1)

Now I’ve never uses sass so I wasn’t sure if the syntax was wrong so I checked the master branch which is actively deployed and it…