Express: Organizing Chaos

Blogpost 302

Photo by Daniele Levis Pelusi on Unsplash

What do you find challenging about coding?

The challenges I have with coding are the same challenges I experience in my day to day life. I want to jump into the project immediately because I have so many ideas, but that skips the crucial step of whiteboarding. I have discovered through trial and error (lots of error) that if I start right off the bat without whiteboarding it ends up taking much longer to complete assignments because I have usually made them harder than I need to. Luckily, this has taught me to whiteboard first because it saves me time and helps with organization and visualizing the entire assignment.

Talk about a project that disappointed you. What would you change?

A project that disappointed me was the new API app in 311 at the end of week 7. They gave us 4 prompts, and had us choose one to build an API out of. However, 2 of the APIs they provided for the project (including the one my group chose) were extremely hard to get started with and not clear APIs at all. It was very frustrating to sit there trying to begin a project when we couldn’t even figure out how to use the resource provided, even with the help of a tutor. We were initially excited about the project, but it just became an annoying introduction to APIs. If I could change something I would provide different resources for other students that are more user-friendly, especially for students who have never used APIs before.

List three key things to consider when coding with SEO in mind.

Source code is very useful for SEO, and should definitely be coded accordingly. You should:

• Take advantage of the title tag, because it will be in the search results. And only have one per page.
• Put in a meta description and make it as appealing as possible since it is advertising for your site.
• Only have one H1 per page and make sure it grabs people’s attention and engages them enough to ensure they keep clicking!

List five or more ways you could optimize a website to be as efficient and scalable as possible.

• Independent features and nodes.
• Caches (create a small repository for quick access to the results of frequent queries and shorten the waiting time for the user to respond).
• Proxy (collapses multiple identical requests into one and lessens queries to database. Response time and database performance increases).
• Queues
• Node.js