Introduction

I chanced upon Sixing Huang, who is a Triple Neo4j-Certified Bioinformatic Data Scientist and Tech Writer on LinkedIn.
It was an article that he wrote about neo4j application that got me curious about his background.

So by happenstance, I saw that he did a course on Web Development from udemy. Since I was on a lookout for one, I took that as a recommendation and went with it.

HTML, CSS, JS

I was lucky that udemy was running a promo, I paid about $15 dollar and I felt that it was the cheapest investment cost I could do for myself. Through the this course, I finally got formally introduced to basics of HTML, CSS and Javascript. If I were to describle these basic 3 building blocks of a website;

    • HTML : Serves its purpose similar to the likes of a skeleton structure

    • CSS : The different styles, color, visual properties and attributes

    • Javascript : It supports the actions, behaviour and functionality

Frontend, Backend, APIs

Just as we get new iphones each year, web development space also go through different phases and upgrades. I was then introduced to the concept of Frontend & Backend Frameworks and how it works along with APIs and how they all work together.

Using YouTube as an example, what we see on the website visually are representations of the roles Frontend play in a web application.
For instance the YouTube search bar, the login feature, the side bar menu, the homepage gallery thumbnails listing the various videos are all components built out of Frontend framework.

The role of the Backend Framework, together with APIs helps retrieve information for the user. It is like an invisible pair of hands where it helps fetches the data from “behind the scene” (call database/servers) and sends it back for a user to consume via the Frontend component.

The full suite of frameworks introduced in the course were MongoDB, Express.js, React, Node.js, which in short called the MERN Stack.

What I learnt

Through this, I also got to learn about how useful Javascript is as a programming language. My first coding language I learnt on the job was Python. Have I know that Javascript has so much utility and potential to offer, perhaps I would have chosen this over Python to start learning first.

I guess better late than never now. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Besides getting some hands on in web development, referring to other’s past learning experiences on LinkedIn could be quite useful. Given that there are so much content out there, leaning on others for their previous experince also help provide some form of filtering process to choose where/whom to learn from.
It could also serve as inspiration on what skillset one could be pick up while carving your own career in data.