There will be a number of times when you will want to get data from the internet for a program you are writing. APIs are a great resource, but only if one exists with the subject matter you want and if the data you are looking for is static and unchanging. If you want information about the upcoming events for your favorite celebrity or the approaching games for the Seahawks or Mariners, APIs don’t cut it. Scraping is a great way to get data from a webpage.

Scraping is the process of extracting data from a webpage. It can refer…

Many developers will rely on interacting with an app to prove it works the way they want. But this is not the most efficient way to do things. Writing tests for your code is a good practice, and it can save time finding bugs down the line. In this series of blog posts, I’m going to talk about how to write tests for a Rails application.

First, I’ll talk a bit about why testing is so important. Writing tests is useful because you can use them to check that a small piece of your code works the way it was…

With my last few blog posts, I spent time talking about the importance of testing with software development, and I gave an intro to writing tests with Rails. For this post, I’m going to talk about how to write tests in one of the foremost JavaScript testing frameworks.

With plain old vanilla JavaScript, not using any frameworks like React or Angular, there are a variety of testing frameworks you can choose from, but I am going to talk about Mocha. The reason I chose Mocha is that the syntax is similar to the tests I was writing with Rails, and…

By this point, I have learned to make and design websites a few different ways with a few different frameworks. But the thing I don’t have experience in is creating mobile projects. Nowadays, there are job postings specifically for mobile developers, considering that Apps are so important to everyday life. So, to start getting into mobile development, I thought it would be a good idea to look into React Native. Since I already have experience with React, learning React Native should make it so that I can focus on learning what is different about mobile development compared to creating websites…

When building applications for the web, considering the front-end and how it will look to the users is becoming more and more important. Users of the internet now expect webpages to be very interactive, look visually appealing, and load without taking too much time. This is why front-end frameworks have become so popular in the past few years. There are many different frameworks to choose from, but the most popular is React.js, so it’s not surprising that React is the framework I was taught in the bootcamp I attended. I also recently decided to teach myself Vue.js so I could…

As I mentioned in my previous post on Routing in React, a lot of frontend frameworks are single page applications. This means that, since you are not doing GET requests to a server every time a user moves between “pages”, the URL of the site will not automatically change. Vue Router is made so that you can do client-side routing for a vue application to make the URL change depending on what a user sees on the page.

There are a few ways to add Vue Router to a Vue application. If you are downloading Vue with a script tag…

Last week I talked about some of the basic Git commands that a programmer should know to work on projects on their own. I talked about starting a repo and connecting it to GitHub, adding and committing changes, then pushing those changes to GitHub, and using git status to see where you stand. But the great thing about Git that I didn’t really talk about is how it lets you work on projects that other people have started and continue to add to.

One thing that I mentioned I’d talk about in this post is branching. …

I got interested in software engineering after taking a few college classes in Computer Science, and I learned more by attending a coding bootcamp. Something that I ended up using a lot, and that I didn’t expect I’d have to learn was Git and GitHub. All of the labs that I worked on at my bootcamp come from repositories on GitHub, and when we worked on group projects, knowing how to use Git was vital. In this blog post, I’ll talk about some of the ways I learned to use Git while at my bootcamp.

First off I’ll talk about…