Day 44

Deployment and MEAN Black Belt

This morning I learned how to deploy via AWS (Amazon Web Services). I think usually, students deploy via Heroku (although there are a bunch of options to deploy). Heroku is very simple, you create a deployment server and git push your project unto that server where it will automatically run. Once you write 'heroku open', it will open up on your browser your project and if everything ran right, the project will load with its own database. AWS deployment is similar, but a lot more work as you have to go on the AWS site to launch a new instance of your project. Then you go onto your ubuntu server, type in that specific instance IP which will send you to a cloud server. The instruction had us go into a specific directory where we have to install node.js and changing to another directory to git clone our project from GitHub and finally linking our project into another directory and finally starting the server that way. Oh, and there is another public IP that your AWS instance gives you, which is what you use to share it publicly. And that is how AWS deployment works..don't know if I'm going to deploy on AWS that often.

Now onto the black belt. I was pretty nervous for the exam since I thought it would be a lot harder than the red belt and I was not very confident in my MEAN skills besides finishing up the Discussion Board assignment yesterday. Upon unlocking the test however, it wasn't as bad as I thought it was. The only thing I haven't seen was the use of time to act as data that needs to be manipulated to have certain functions. I got almost all the features but during the last hour and a half, I was attempting to plug in the last feature and it broke my code and I spent the remainder of my time desperately trying to fix my code. At one point, I was reading a function name and its code and....I had no idea how it related to the flow of information between my client side and my server side. Talk about a brain meltdown. Anyways, although I didn't get a perfect score on it, I was reasonably happy that I was able to solve a lot of things that I didn't have prior experience with.