Monday
Now that my PWP is turned in, next up is just focusing on my capstone project. I’m really excited for the next steps: sticking in data and then starting on the front end. Part of our project is to color code assessed property values and then seeing what sort of trends show up on the map. I’m excited to see how it actually ends up looking.
I couldn’t help but make one last tweek to my PWP: the optional step of an optional step that was suggested to us. Adding security headers. Security headers help by telling the browser things like which external servers it is ok to pull resources to or send information to. This makes it a whole lot harder for somebody to hack a site and do something like skimming credit card information from a site that takes payments.
Later, I realized the settings also prevented my site from using Google’s ReCaptcha and broke my email contact form. So I rolled things back to have a fully working site, but next up on my list is figuring out how to add the exclusions for the sites I do need my site to be able to contact and blocking everything else.
Tuesday
Our capstone focus this week is APIs- making it so that the front-ends of our sites have a way to get information from the back-ends. For our project, most of the data is loaded behind the scenes meaning that there is very little that users can actually add or change. But we wrote APIs for everything anyway pretending like a user could add property information or a crime report just so we could get the practice writing full APIs.
This has been another interesting thing to learn in that it has helped me to put the pieces together in my mind about how everything works.
Wednesday
One of the employers from our mock interviews invited me back for a follow-up interview with the full hiring crew. This is the first real interview of my whole life. I am excited. I’m a little nervous. It all feels so fast. I knew the Bootcamp could lead to employment opportunities, but I didn’t expect an interview before it was even over.
Thursday
Thanksgiving! We get two days off for Thanksgiving break and it feels so luxurious after the schedule we’ve been keeping.
Plans were to go see family and eat turkey, but it snowed a ton so we stayed home, ate cereal and pumpkin pie and pulled the two-year-old around on the sled.
Sunday
Today I started learning about Mapbox which is what we’re using to get our map to display for our project. I did a few of their basic tutorials to just get a map into a website.
I also played around with what they call Mapbox Studio- which offers powerful features for uploading data, turning it into tile sets that display well at different zoom levels and creating map ‘styles’ that include specific data sets and styling options like colors. I uploaded the property data from the county assessor’s and color coded it by value.
It basically does half of what we want our capstone project to do, although it’s sort of taking a short cut because it’s not dynamically loading the data from our database. But it will provide an amazing background to use as we start the front-end development process. It will give us a sort of MVP to build on which I find really reassuring. No matter what else happens, we will have something to demo at the end.