This post is part of an ongoing series recapping my experience in Oregon State University’s eCampus (online) post-baccalaureate Computer Science degree program. You can learn more about the program here.
Six-word summary: :( :( :( :( :( :(
Web dev is, for some reason, this really polarizing thing in tech. I’ve certainly heard a lot of devs go “Ewww, JavaScript!” (both in my real life job and from my classmates). That’s too bad, because I think the web is really cool and it’s where a lot of people spend a lot of their time these days! I like building web apps, but I can see why some people don’t – it’s prone to “flavor of the week” syndrome, the tooling isn’t great, JavaScript does some things “weird”, etc.
I went into this class curious to see what aspects of web would be taught, since it’s such a broad topic to stuff into just 8 (or 11) weeks. Here’s some of what we covered in CS 290:
Git
This is the first OSU class I’ve had that covers git in any capacity (I’m halfway through the program). This is awesome – hooray, CS290, for introducing git!
I wish the OSU program covered it sooner. It has been frustrating to group with people in my previous classes who have never used it before and would rather use things like email (!!!) to share files because they don’t know git.
Unfortunately, 290 didn’t go very in-depth with git. We pushed two files to a Github repo in the first week and called it good. We literally never used git again. I think this was a huge missed opportunity: the class could easily include a group project of some sort that focuses on collaborating in a git repo, or require us to post incremental work on a project to our github repos, or something.
Quirks of JavaScript
The first three weeks of CS290 focused heavily on “this weird thing JavaScript does”. The usual suspects are here: lack of strict typing, hoisting, closures. It’s not that these things aren’t important, it’s that they aren’t what makes web development compelling or useful. Starting the class out by spending three weeks on these topics just seemed to make JavaScript look weird and annoying, when in practice, these things aren’t that big a deal.
I think it’d have been cooler if they set us to actually making things and learning the tools of the trade in those first three weeks. In the accelerated schedule, week 4 is when it got interesting: we made an HTML website with JavaScript methods to navigate around in a table and mark cells yellow.
Week 4 homework: a bare-bones interactive “website”. This is the first step in building the kind of stuff that makes the web compelling!
Installing npm packages on a server
They had us do this in week 1 – OSU provides some server space, and everyone was tasked with claiming a port and setting up a little server on it.
We never came back to it. I don’t know why we did this so early in the class. Node and its (infinite) packages is an interesting topic and it’s weird to just install it and never come back to it. It was like a story that someone started telling and never finished.
Some light database stuff and routing with Express
This part was fun – make routes (like “/get”) and make them return data from a class-provided database. This work will be extremely useful as starter code when you take CS340 (Databases) so keep it somewhere safe.
The biggest, most complex project of this class is the one where you develop backend routes for database interaction. You’ll spend a lot of time on form validation and making rows in a table switch between a read-only state and an editable state. This is also the project I thought was the most interesting of all of them, since it was the most like a real site.
What CS290 didn’t cover
Sadly, there was no mention of Chrome’s various debugging tools, running node locally, front-end frameworks like React, the difference between running JavaScript on the front end and the backend, the staggering quantity of problems that have already been solved with neat existing NPM packages, unit testing, integration testing, and deployment.
Somewhat irritatingly, some of the assignments had what I would consider poor coding practices. The second assignment (sorting automobiles) in particular irked me because it makes unnecessary copies of an array:
/*This function sorts arrays using an arbitrary comparator. You pass it a comparator and an array of objects
appropriate for that comparator and it will return a new array which is sorted with the largest object in index 0
and the smallest in the last index*/
function sortArr( comparator, array ){
//returning a new array to satisfy assignment requirements; we could have run sort on array itself (it's passed by reference)
var sortedArr = array.sort(comparator, array);
return sortedArr;
}
Arrays are passed by reference; there was no need to create a new one and return the new one. In fact, we could have run .sort() in place instead of calling a completely separate method for it. Maybe I’m just cranky, though.
The workload in weeks 1, 2, 3, and 4 is very low, but then things pick up after that.
CS290 final exam
Whoever wrote this exam does not know what is important in web development.
I’ve used JavaScript (both as a hobbyist and a professional) for over half a decade, and I got one of the lowest scores I’ve ever gotten on a test here. I don’t know what to say – expect a ton of oddly-worded bullshit questions about tricky trivia that have no relevance to how JavaScript is used or real life web development practices.
CS290 parting thoughts
I can only guess what this class is like for someone who is new to web development. It’s probably a disjointed pastiche of topics that get introduced in a vacuum and then quickly abandoned. I’m sure this class isn’t helping anyone become enthusiastic about web development, which is too bad.
For a better introduction to modern web development consider building your own site. I think that’s how a lot of us got started – we wanted a website for some reason or another and set one up. There’s plenty of project starters (known as ‘boilerplate’) out there to pick from. Here’s what I would recommend…
- Buy some $5/month shared hosting and make your own portfolio site out of HTML and your own CSS. Once you’ve got that…
- Start up a node server on your own computer and get it to serve your own project
- Build a simple one-page app that does a simple job using a front-end framework such as Angular or React (here are some ideas: a text capitalizer, a shipping price calculator, an anagram solver)
- Use a popular front-end styling framework, such as Bootstrap
- Realize what you made is garbage and start over
- Repeat a bunch of times
- Keep Googling any time you get stuck
- If you build something decent, deploy it somewhere like Heroku and show it off!