Can we all agree that we’re collectively going to ignore the fact that we just wrapped up week 10, and I’m only now getting around to writing up week 8?
Yeah?
Awesome. You’re all the best.
Day 35
Monday was the day I learned about MongoDB, about which I’m…conflicted. Right now, I’m siding pretty hard with Sarah Mei’s treatise on Why You Should Never Use MongoDB.
For those who are new to Mongo: it’s a NoSQL database. NoSQL databases are generally better at scaling and overall performance. They’re more flexible, and they’re (allegedly?) better suited to agile workflows, where you might be making adjustments to your database schema as often as every couple of weeks. Instead of storing data in rows and tables, they store data in documents and collections of documents—essentially, as JSON that’s fairly agnostic about what it contains. What they’re not: relational. I don’t yet have personal experience working with non-relational data, and I think Sarah makes a convincing argument that most data is relational, but I’ve been trying to come around to the possibility that Mongo might be the right choice for some things. Todd Hoff makes some good points; I’m still mulling over these.
After Mongo, we talked about Node: Node is a JavaScript runtime that lets you do things like interact with the file system or write a server. Typical uses of Node rely pretty heavily on asynchronicity, which let us build on what we learned last week about promises. We started by using Node’s HTTP module to make a request to a Node-based echo server, using both traditional callbacks and then* promises.
*LOLOLOLOLOL promise joke.
Day 36
On Tuesday, we examined the echo server we made requests to on Monday. Key things a Node server needs to do:
- create server instance
- pass at least one callback to do work
- receive request
- do any necessary processing
- make response
- send response
- close connection
Rails did all of this for us, but in Node, we have to write it all. All of this server code is what’s behind Express, which is a library/framework that adds (among other things) routing capabilities to Node servers. We touched quickly on Express and promised to come back to it later in the week.
Day 37
Actually working with Mongo came next: we ran through basic CRUD functionality from the command line, then moved on to Mongoose, which lets you define data models in Mongo and felt a little bit like having some of my sanity restored. Quick cheat sheet:
rails : node
active record : mongoose
ruby object : js object
sql : mongodb
Mongoose also gives you the ability to set up “virtual” properties on your data models, which are properties you calculate on the fly based on real, non-virtual properties on those models. For example: you can define a virtual property on a Person model to calculate a person’s age based on the current date and on that person’s birthday, which is stored in the database.
We also came back to Express and wrote a simple Express API. This felt good and familiar—I’ve seen this process in Laravel, in Rails, and in Express, now, and I’m starting to feel like I’m gaining a little bit of fluency with the process of setting up routes and controllers across different languages/frameworks.
Day 38-39
We spent part of Thursday morning going over Agile and Scrum to prep for our upcoming group project. I’ve heard about Agile a few times—at an HUIT summit a couple of years ago, when I was trying to figure out how best to work with various teams in my last job, and at a Boston Ruby meetup earlier this month. I’m a total process and organization geek, and I’m excited at the prospect of working within an agile framework up close.
The rest of the week was devoted to learning how to upload files to Amazon Web Services S3 using Express and Multer. We started by writing a command line script (along the way, I learned about the shebang: #!), then moved on to writing a simple web app that would accept a file and a comment about it, upload the file to AWS S3, and store the URL and the comment in a Mongo DB.
I’d like to come back to this—we didn’t end up needing to use it in our group project, but I have a couple of ideas for how to incorporate this, and I’d love to implement them at some point.
We got our project prompts on Friday evening and headed straight into group project work for most of Week 9. I’m working on that post now, so stay tuned for my notes-slash-ravings on data modeling for a survey builder application in Mongo/Mongoose!