Monday
Another Monday morning. First order of business today was signing up for Digital Ocean, the hosting site the Bootcamp uses for Personal Website Projects. Long term, I’ll probably stick with NearlyFreeSpeech.net for my hosting needs. I’ve been very happy with them so far, but for class purposes, I want to follow along and see how they do things.
Also, a snap challenge to filter out words that start with ‘e’ from a paragraph of text. I like snap challenges because I almost always finish them before the allotted hour is up and can use the extra time to work on something else.
With only four weeks left in the program, it feels like the atmosphere is shifting. On Friday, we’ll have our mock interviews- a chance to have a ‘practice’ interview and see how we do. These practice interviews are done by real employers in town who volunteer to come in and help out the bootcamp. So technically it’s just practice, but also, they’re real employers so there is a certain amount of pressure to do well.
After many versions of my resume, I’m finally getting it to a place that seems solid.
My PWP is coming along nicely and while there are some things I will keep tweeking around, it too is starting to seem pretty solid.
REST APIs
This week marks the start of writing the REST APIs for our capstones.
Tuesday
This morning was open work time and I took the chance to make some small changes to my PWP to just clean up a few things. I’m starting to feel pretty good about it.
PWP deployment!!
The afternoon included a walk through of setting things up to deploy our pwps. Having set up a website or two previously, some of it was pretty familiar to me. Other parts were new and cool to see, like adding a user for ssh access instead of using root.
I’m obsessed with listening to Darknet Diaries and one of the episodes talked about how you never user root as the user. The guy that was in charge of this server that got hacked talked about seeing the root user doing stuff and he knew that was bad… very bad.
Being armed with the knowledge of why I want to be able to set up a new user and why using root is a bad idea made learning this feel much more relevant and useful to me. My classmates seemed unimpressed by the lecture.
Also running Linux on a laptop probably makes it feel more relevant to me too.
Set up ssh access on the server
//create user
useradd -c “Fname Lname” -m -s /bin/bash -g users -G sudo newusername
//create password
passwd newusername
// Move .ssh key file
cp -r .ssh /home/newusername
//change ownership of the .ssh directory
cd /home/newusername
chown newusername:users .ssh/
chown newusername:users .ssh/authorized_keys
// Test Changes
exit
ssh newusername@someipaddress
// if successful delete the root user
sudo rm -rf /root/.ssh
Wednesday
Docker & more docker. So I have a few basic websites that I have worked with for a long time. But I’ve never worked with Docker or anything like it before. Docker lets you create containers – basically a whole operating system with specific software, libraries and configurations. Like a whole world that exists within another world.
The advantages include consistent deployment settings and improved security.
This has been a really cool thing to start to work with and learn about. I’m just starting to grasp some of the basics, but I’m sure it’s something I need to learn more about.
Thursday
SSL & LetsEncrypt
After learning about droplets, Docker, images, containers and SSL, it was time to actually deploy our PWPs. This was not quite smooth sailing, but once I had my site up and working over https I felt really good.
Friday – Mock Interview Day!
One of the great things about Deep Dive Coding is that they focus a lot on professional development. One of the highlights of this is interview day. Businesses from around the area send in people to do mock interviews. They are sort of billed as being no pressure because they are just practice. But also, they are real employers and some of them are looking for developers. So it provides a realistic level of stress and excitement.
Each student gets two interviews- an HR interview and a tech interview. Contrary to the general feelings around the room, I was most worried about the HR interview. I feel confident in my coding abilities, especially when it comes to the whiteboard problems, but I don’t feel that polished answering questions like “Tell me about a challenge you faced and how you overcame it.”
As it turned out, my HR interview ended up feeling really comfortable and very conversational. (I’ll find out later how the interviewer actually ranked my performance.) And I was able to learn about his company and consider if it’s a place I’d want to actually apply at. (Bottom line, the company sounded like a great place, but I don’t think they have an opening for the sort of work I want to be doing.)
My tech interview actually ended up feeling a tad bit more awkward, but was also a great experience. Similar to the HR interview, I found the best part to be the opportunity to ask the interviewer questions about the company, how it is working there and what they’re looking for.
One thing that stuck out to me about the place was that they seemed to have a lot of people that had worked there a long time and I think that can be an indicator of a good place to work. Another thing that stuck out was my interviewer talked about how they have encouraged her to learn new things. One of my must-haves for whatever I end up doing next is being in a place where I can continue learning.
The Weekend
After asking everybody possible for feedback on my PWP, I made a few changes and then submitted it. So… here’s my grand reveal: Custom By Kyla
I’m super excited to have it done and proud of having implemented so many things in it that were new to me.