Web Developer Jargon Demystified
aka Web Practices 101
Here are a few practices and design flows that I came to know in my learning experience at Crio.do ‘s Winter of Doing Stage 1. As an aspiring Full stack Developer I was pretty stunned how I missed these practices and the first thing that popped into my mind was Why didn’t I knew them earlier? So to save you guys from that and also to give more insights on these for anyone who are still laying their baby steps in the Web domain like I decided to sum up things a bit in this blog! So read and Enjoy! and also don’t forget to leave feedback..
PWA : Progressive Web Applications (Progressive Web Apps in general).
These are basically applications that are delivered through the web, built using common web technologies like HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. These are made to work on cross platform be it smart phones or on desktops. These are fast and produce great user-experience on multiple platforms which use a standards-compliant browser. So I built a PWA that shows my portfolio using Netlify (for frontend) and Heroku (for Backend).
Netlify is a cloud computing company that offers hosting and server less backend services for web applications and static websites. (This provides a free 100GB bandwidth for the basic user type.)
Heroku is a PaaS (Platform as a Service) cloud platform that lets us build, run and deploy our applications entirely on the cloud. (You can get started with building PWA’s with 100$ free credit provided by Heroku (free-tier) if you’re well versed with React.js)
A few popular PWA’s include :
- Flipbook : A common app that we can find on Samsung mobiles. It has a great UI and delivers interesting and fresh stories straight from the internet.
- MakeMyTrip : The popular bookings platform that provides a seamless service to plan our trips.
- Spotify : A platform that provides us with a plethora of audio treats from music podcasts to audiobooks and episodes.
- 2048 Game : A very popular game that rakes up our mind till we get that magical 2048 number.
- Pinterest: The site that holds our sight for a long time and where we can just get lost looking at beautiful boards on inspiration ranging from room décor to career advice.
API s : Acronym for Application Programming Interfaces
An API is a set of definitions and protocols for building and integrating application software. These are the intermediary software that allows one application to communicate with other. To simplify, an API delivers a user response to a system and sends back the system response to the user. They are omnipresent. They are solely responsible for the things that happen in the world of web. They are the postmen that carry information (data) from one application to other. These can be used to provide a lot of functionality in applications and allows them to access data and interact with external software components, operating systems or even other services. So, there are a lot of API s but RESTful API s (API s that are created using REST i.e., REpresentational State Transfer architectural style) are more widely used because :
- Flexibility : They can handle multiple types of calls, return different data formats simultaneously.
- Scalability : The product may be scaled at any time by a development team without much difficulty due to the separation between the client side and the server side.
- Stateless: REST APIs are stateless, meaning that calls can be made independently of one another, and each call contains all of the data necessary to complete itself successfully.
In the project we made use of GitHub API that fetches the repository data and displays that on the Website and also made a post on LinkedIn using REST APIs.
Apart from learning these I also got a chance to brush up my understanding on Git basics and Working on the terminal using Linux. Working on Command Line had given me a lot more deeper insights on how to be more conscious on what you are doing. I believe these are quiet important to learn as they serve as an integral part of the developing lifecycle and are needed while deploying websites. So to help you people get a grip on this, I would link a few cheat sheets that can be used to learn these commands (Git and Linux). This sums it up of the little description of the new jargon that I came across in my learning journey at Crio ’s winter of doing.
Okay that’s a lot of techie stuff! But, would you believe me if I say I managed to learn all of that in a span of 10 days. You bet!. The whole Crio team were so helpful and resolved our queries and addressed our problems very diligently. And we were evil enough to cook up new problems for them every other day. Wonder how! Well, due to constant load on the servers, the servers gave up and the site was down for quite some time consistently. And we were left with nothing to do! Just then Crio Team organized a Meme’s war and all the memers wanted was just a cue. They made a ton of memes and we all had a hearty laugh.
Thanks to ever buzzing channels and an awesome community I was easily surpassed my road blocks nevertheless being a newbie. This filled me with confidence and motivation to learn more. Being part of the community I learnt that “You rise by Lifting Others”. I feel very blessed to be a part of this community. I learnt a lot about industry practices and the actual development flow that takes place while building any software product. The live insightful sessions from top tech experts and industry pioneers were an added perk. I am really grateful to the ever helping community of developers that we have in this program for helping me at times when I was utterly clueless. I was able to easily get back on track without wasting much time when I was stuck. The modules were very comprehensive and easy to follow.
References / Resources :
