I recently started the backend part of the Udemy course I’m doing, which puts me in a kind of weird position [I think, anyway!] ; I’m still doing frontend on freeCodeCamp, but backend on the Web Developer Bootcamp. Because there were so many gaps in the freeCodeCamp curriculum, I was hoping that they would kind of line up at that point [between front & back end], but that doesn’t seem to have happened.

I still have the dreaded Twitch API project to do for freeCodeCamp- I hit that project just as a new chrome update was released, I think, so none of the examples provided worked, and I was feeling a bit thrown to the wolves when I first went over the challenge. Having just checked the challenge page, it appears [bear in mind that I last checked it a few months ago!] that they’ve simplified the challenge a bit. Whether it’s that, or that I’m just feeling more confident lately, I’m not sure, but it definitely seems much more manageable now!

I haven’t returned to freeCodeCamp just yet! I was a bit anxious about starting the backend portion of the Web Developer Bootcamp, and I thought the best way to deal with it would be to start tackling it right away- and I was right! The Backend Basics section started out with Command Line Basics.  I realised pretty quickly that I’d done this before, but not in a while, so it was a good refresher for me. It was also good to get me away from using a couple Windows commands that I had used previously. The commands we used were :

• cd – change directory
• ls – list the contents of the current directory
• touch – create a file inside the current or specified directory
• mkdir – create a folder/directory inside the current or specified directory
• rmdir – remove the specified directory
• rm -rf – remove the specified directory with recursive force, that means including all child contents- directories and files!

This is all going to seem like really basic stuff, if you’ve done it before, but until fairly recently I’ve always used the GUI [graphical user interface], so while I’ve known that the command line was there, it just seemed like something I didn’t need to deal with. Truth be told, it seemed like something I had no business using, and I’d probably just brick my laptop with it!

The latest resource I’ve been introduced to is Cloud9. It’s a site you can go to where you can develop projects in the cloud. It seems to be a pretty amazing resource so far- I haven’t done a lot with it just yet, but I’ve heard a few people say some pretty great things!

I’m loving my current burst of motivation- sometimes it can be really hard to put time aside to work on my laptop after a busy day at work, but I’m at a stage now where I am starting to feel like I’m making progress, which is important for me, and definitely makes it a lot easier!