My Coding Journey Part 1

I will share you my progress in coding including the projects I have made, languages I used, and even frameworks/libraries I explored and used.

Introduction

When I was in Junior High School, I was introduced to programming using C++ in one of our subjects. That was my first time coding but only on console or terminal window and some basic looping. Later, we were again introduced to Graphical User Interface (GUI) and created applications using Visual BASIC. On the my last year, we were required to have a thesis and I created a Lap Timer using Arduino and Light Dependent Resistor. I ended up getting the Best Thesis award.

During Senior High School, I stopped coding until we were required again to have a thesis on our last year. I then thought again of creating an application. Our group then created an Enrollment and Assessment System using Visual BASIC. Our group also got the Best Thesis award.

Year 2020

During college, we used C++ and Python on lectures and laboratories. That’s where my interest in coding started.

Then one day, a batchmate invited me to attend, BlueHacks 2020, a hackathon organized by CompSAt. My batchmate advised me to learn Flutter as it will be the programming language that we will use. One week before the hackathon, I started to watch Flutter tutorials on YouTube. During the hackathon, I was very slow in creating the mobile application since I only studied Flutter for a single week and didn’t have a clear grasp and understanding regarding the framework. We were not able to finish the mobile app. During presentation, I was really amazed on most participants since they were able to create a working application within a very short time. I was then inspired to continue learning to code. By the way, our project was called “What’s your ulam pare”, a tinder-like mobile application but for foods.

A snippet of What’s Your Ulam Pare

After the hackathon, I started a project, which is functional but not yet finished as of writing this article. The project was Junior Assistant of Rane Villanueva - the Idiotic Senior (JARVIS) and created using Python, HTML, CSS, and Javascript. When I created the project, I researched on what will I use for the Graphical User Interface (GUI) of the application when I want to use Python. Available choices before were Tkinter, PyQT, and pywebview. I chose pywebview since HTML, CSS, and JS is very customizable in terms of GUI. The problem is that I haven’t studied JS yet. Maybe that was the reason that I haven’t continued the project for some time.

Moving on, I continued to study Flutter. I purchased the course Introduction to Flutter Development Using Dart by Angela Yu. After finishing the course, I didn’t have any progress on Flutter anymore.

Covid-19 Pandemic

At the start of the pandemic, I was seeing many websites for tracking the statistics of CoVid-19 Cases. I then had an idea to make a chatbot on Facebook Messenger. It was created using Python and Flask and only offers a messenger chatbot on the early version. As of now, statistics are only available thru web on https://covid-chatbot-ph.herokuapp.com/ and the messenger chatbot is not functioning anymore since I haven’t updated it yet.

Moving further, one of our subjects has a requirement that we will make a python application that has a functionality of an Artificial Intelligence (AI). Our group immediately though of Covid-19 related projects. We ended up creating a Web Application Chatbot using Python and Django. We decided to make a Web Application since our initial plan was to make it available on the internet. When we finished our project, I tried to deploy it on Heroku. However, the tensorflow library has a very huge size and is not possible to be deployed on the free tier of heroku. If I had known of Github student benefits or AWS EC2 free tier during that time, I would have successfully deployed it. Click here to see our project on Github.

I was then invited to participate in a Contact Tracing Project using bluetooth functionality of phones. I was on the frontend team and used react-native. Due to android permissions and restrictions, we weren’t able to continue the project.

The Start of Web Development

After that project, I started to focus more on Web Development. I started to learn HTML, CSS, and JS until I explored React framework. I created my first personal website using React and was later converted NextJS. I have also created a portfolio website where I upload files and answers on my previous subjects which is more popularly known in our school as Old Testaments (OT). The website’s frontend was created using React while the backend was created using Python and Django since it was the only backend I know that time. Some other projects are my ESP8266 based RGB Remote which is available on web version and flutter mobile app version. I also created a Web-based Gross Weighted Average (GWA) Calculator.

Hacktoberfest

Around the third week of October, I was browsing Facebook and came into Hacktoberfest 2020 thru PWA Pilipinas Page. To participate and receive swag, I needed to have four pull requests that are accepted and merged to any participating repositories before within October. PWA Pilipinas was participating during that time. The project was a todo web application and several people participated in creating the website. I was able to create four pull requests to that website and all was accepted. Thus, I was able to complete the Hacktoberfest 2020 Challenge and received the swags. You can also check my badge here.

Around November, I was again invited to attend a HackFest 2020 organized by Google Developer Student Clubs Loyola. This time, I used React to create the frontend of our Web Application and Firebase for authentication. We called our project Insight, an education platform that can offer Artificial Reality (AR) which is useful for Laboratory Subjects during the Pandemic. You may visit our website here and login using qwe@qwe.qwe for the email and qweqweqwe for the password. You can also see our repositories here.

I used firebase for the Insight Project since that was the easiest authentication to setup and my other choice would be Django which takes longer to setup than firebase. To enhance my backend skills, I started casually learning MERN (MongoDB, Express, React, Node) Stack. I also continued using and learning Firebase Database and started to learn Typescript. Since I learn more by doing projects, I created a To do web application using React and Firebase which as of now is not yet finished since I lessen my coding time during the month of December and had a hiatus on coding until February on the next year.

To be continued

I will continue my coding journey on part 2 of this blog