man in tie presenting

freeCodeCamp Nashville May Meetup Recap

So today Dave Harned and I hosted the monthly freeCodeCamp Nashville Meetup. There were 8 of us there and it was good to see new and “old” faces. I think we’re starting to build more of a core group that will consistently attend the meetup. With that, we’ve started exploring some other options for larger meetup locations. The library is nice but the wifi is awfully slow and that’s a pretty big downside considering what we’re meeting for.

Dave and I presented on RESTful APIs and general REST info. You can view the slides here and to get a feel for what it was like, the image above is what Dave looked like presenting. So after that, we chatted for a bit about many things.

IDE’s were brought up. Specifically, WebStorm (which you can get for free with a .edu email address), Brackets, and Visual Studio Code were discussed. As were the limitations of CodePen and using Cloud9 instead and some of a Cloud9 setup.

In the discussion of local dev environments, Dave brought up MAMP and how he was dabbling in some WordPress when he was using it.

Other resources that were mentioned were: Eli the Computer Guy and The Coding Train on YouTube. An algorithms course on Coursera was mentioned but not the specific one. We were talking about Stanford though so I think this is the right one.

We also worked through the freeCodeCamp Truncate a string challenge together. I didn’t think to save it at the time but we used Dave’s computer so hopefully, he has the solution locally on his machine still. If so I’ll update with it.

UPDATE here’s the code:

function truncateString(str, num) {
  if (str.length <= num) {
    return str;
  } else if (num <=3) {
    return str.slice(0, num) + "...";
  } else {
    return str.slice(0, num - 3) + "...";
  }
}

truncateString("A-tisket a-tasket A green and yellow basket", 11);

We had a good time and there were a few extended conversations after we officially ended which I liked. I’m not a Sr. Dev and can’t mentor people too much, yet. However, I really do enjoy seeing people connect with each other and the community we’re slowly building around the central theme of people new to coding utilizing freeCodeCamp to learn.