GitHub – joedag32

Terminal >Hackathon

So I entered another hackathon through DevPost. This one was for Terminal >Hackathon Tech Takes On Mental Health. We had to come up with something for mental health.

I paired up with with someone from the previous hackathon and I believe two others joined in. With the short turnaround I was the only developer on this one, but everyone chipped in other ways.

We would up making Tell Me Something Good. It’s a basic page that allows a user to input how they are feeling. It then sends that submission to the Google Cloud Natural Language REST API. The API takes the text submitted and analyzes it’s sentiment, returning a score. A 1 or it’s very positive, a -1 if it’s extremely negative, with increments in between.

It’s actually a pretty slick API. We threw all sorts of sentences and paragraphs at it, and the ML (machine learning) really does an amazing job of giving accurate results.

An example of the project can be found here on Glitch:

https://maize-sable-triceratops.glitch.me

and on GitHub here:

https://github.com/joedag32/cheerup-gcnl-api

This one was very fun too. It took me a little bit to the the authorization going with the REST API, but once I got it going it was very flexible and easy to work with. I’m starting to get some very creative uses of sentiment analysis.

Vue JS 2 – The Complete Guide (incl. Vue Router & Vuex)

I’ve been eager to get better with Vue.js, and in additional to reading and watching all the great resources online, I also give the Vue JS 2 – The Complete Guide (incl. Vue Router & Vuex) on Udemy a shot.

The course was really great. I had to put it down for extended periods then come back due to my heavy workload at work, but the instructor Maximilian really put together a very solid Vue.js course. Highly recommended

The final project was a stock trading app. The final stock trading app did a good job of utilizing Vuex and Vue Router too, so that was a plus for sure.

Here’s some of the issues or differences I had on the final project:

The only part I really had a little difficulty on was the Javascript logic for creating the stock and adding it to the portfolio. Ultimately I did get it to work, but I was going with 1 stock component for all the uses, while the course example went with 2 separate stock components. While either could work, going with 2 components in this case did seem to be a bit easier to get going.
Sometimes I still go with ES5 style instead of going with the ES6 Higher Order functions. I forget .forEach, .map, etc. but am getting better of giving them a short as well as the good old for loop that I tend to lean on.
I went with Bootstrap 4 instead of 3 that was used in the tutorial
For now I’ve omitted the Firebase integration. I’ll probably go back and include that at some point, but was thinking of implementing it in a slightly different way that was was proposed in the lesson.
Had to change the publicPath in config for the project to work on GitHub Pages. This had me stumped for a few minutes, but made sense once I thought it through.

The source can be found on GitHub. It can also try it out on the GitHub Page Environment.

Great course and highly recommended if you understand Javascript and want to figure out how the Vue.js works.