The programming journey this year has been an interesting one so far. March was a adventure into PHP and the LAMP stack, which was sort of like time-traveling. In beginning of April, I moved directly into the MEAN stack, which oddly left me craving all of that well-documented and clean thought-space PHP had – It’s a jungle in here now!
The Four in Four Challenge
The Four in Four challenge is an epic marathon where you find yourself building four web apps in four weeks. Ideally, they will all be created in one stack you’ve never used before (LAMP, MEAN, or Ruby on Rails, etc) – of course, they’ll be quite crappy, but the idea is that they’ll get less crappy as time marches on, and you’ll learn a lot more about a stack faster with this hands-on approach.
This challenge was inspired by Mackenzie Child. I’ve been watching his channel over the past few weeks and he’s definitely inspired me to take a different approach to learning new stacks. Mackenzie Child did a TWELVE in TWELVE challenge, which I find absolutely intimidating. And since I’m only a third as awesome as he his, I’ll tackle the four in four instead.
The goal is to build four web apps in the MEAN stack over these four weeks. Some of the technologies in the stack will vary from project to project (swap Angular/React, MongoDB/Postgres, etc), but javascript will remain, along with Node.js.
Add a twist
Before I decided to take this challenge, I was working on a gallery of personal designs for my portfolio. I learned a lot of photoshop and html/css tricks over a short period of time and wanted to keep it up. As part of the four in four challenge, I will create one design per week to try and pump out a decent gallery over this time as well.
And make it extra spicy!
Alright, this might be pushing it, but there’s another thing I’m adding onto this over-burdened camel. I’ve been trying to make my programming journey more transparent. I recently attended a TechBreakfast and realized how much I’m missing out on in the community. My location and crippling introverted personality keeps me from really connecting with other developers. The TechBreakfast was an awesome experience; I watched demos of up and coming startups local to Baltimore, spoke with them about current tech issues, and munched on free bagels! The last objectives over these four weeks is to attend some social tech events, write more blog posts, and look into starting a youtube channel.
Alright, let’s collect our thoughts. Here’s what’s to be accomplished each week during the four week marathon:
- Web App (written with Node.js)
- Blog Post
- Design (.psd to html/css)
- Social Tech Event
Let’s get started!