FreeCodeCamp's APIs and Microservices Lessons

TOC:

• FreeCodeCamp's APIs and Microservices Lessons
  • Lessons learned
  • NPM Basics
  • Node and Express Basics
  • MongoDB and Mongoose Basics

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Lessons learned

• I imagined each lesson would build on top of the other in the same repo, instead I realized I was wrong after finishing the first section. So I undertook a small project to clean things up and bring all lessons into one repository.
  1. I made a new repository, I setup my remote origin to the remote branch I had already been pushing to.
  2. I created a subtree ¹ , from the main branch of that origin remote.
  3. I then used git push --force origin HEAD to "rewrite" my commit history of origin (which had already been on GitHub), This forced a rewrite of my origin commit history with my local main branch history (where my HEAD was).

NPM Basics

src

see directory

• I already knew the basics of Semantic Versioning, but I got a clearer understanding of the MAJOR.MINOR.PATCH meaning and how to control what updates your applications will allow with the ~ and ^ prefixes.

Node and Express Basics

src

see directory

• I learned about the global variable in Node __dirname which gives the absolute path of the directory that contains the currently executing file (I used to think ./ was just as reliable but I was mistaken ²).
• I have a better understanding of how to use express to handle routing and serve content.
  • I learned that when watching for any request method with a path that has a colon : character prefixed (e.g. /:somepath/foo) that path becomes a variable tied to the request object (i.e. req.params.somepath)
  • I learned the basics about how to build and chain middleware functions, and how to pass information along in the request object until a final response call is made.

MongoDB and Mongoose Basics

src

see directory

Footnotes

1. https://gist.github.com/SKempin/b7857a6ff6bddb05717cc17a44091202 ↩

2. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/difference-between-__dirname-and-in-node-js/ ↩