Jennifer Bland is a Senior Software Engineer residing in Atlanta, GA. She is an active member of Women Who Code Atlanta. For the past two years, she has been a member of the Leadership Committee for Women Who Code Atlanta as a Technical Lead. As a Technical Lead, she has taught multiple courses and workshops on Node.js, Express.js, MongoDB, and JavaScript.
With her training and work experience, Jennifer was interested in contributing to the Node.js source code, which is Open Source. Jennifer took the initiative to reach out to Franziska Hinkelmann who is an engineer working on Node.js at Google. They met via Google Hangouts and Franziska showed her how to look at the open issues with Node.js.
After searching the list of issues, they found an issue that Jennifer could tackle. From there, Jennifer reached out to the person that submitted the issue to get clarification. Once that information was received, Jennifer was able to make the necessary changes and close the issue. This was Jennifer’s first contribution to the Node.js Open Source code.
We hope that this inspires or guides you in getting started with contributing to Node.js or another open source project.
As a developer, you should consider contributing to open source software. Many of your potential employers will look favorably on these contributions.
But when you’re a new developer, it may feel like contributing to open source is beyond your current skill set. So I’m going to show you how to ignore those feelings of doubt, and how you can start contributing to open source right now.
How I learned Node.js
I first learned about Node.js at my coding bootcamp. The bootcamp specialized in JavaScript. Node.js provides a back-end for a project that is written in JavaScript. So if you have learned JavaScript on the front-end, then you can easily transfer your skills to the back-end with Node.js.
Once I graduated from my coding bootcamp, I was motivated to improve my coding skills as quickly as possible. The only way to do this was to write as much code as possible so I could improve. That’s when I joined freeCodeCamp.
Over a six month period, I completed all four of freeCodeCamp’s original certifications in the freeCodeCamp curriculum. When I got to the section focused on building projects, I used JavaScript and Node.js on the back-end. After completing all the certifications, I worked on one of freeCodeCamp’s initial non-profit projects. The project was for Crimes Committed Against Women.
Have you ever seen a button on a web page that has rounded edges? Have you ever seen an image that fits within a circle? If so, you have seen the impact of using the CSS border-radius property.
You can give any element “rounded corners” by applying a border-radius through CSS.
Border-radius syntax
As with many CSS properties relating to margins, padding, and borders, there are four individual properties — one for each corner of a box element — and one shorthand property. Each of the corner attributes will accept one or two values.
The border-radius property is accepted in every major browser, but they have browser-specific attributes. Here are the CSS and browser-specific attributes:
Each of the individual corner CSS3 properties take either one or two length values (generally ‘px’ or ‘em’ values). If a single value is supplied, then that becomes the radius of a rounded corner. If two values are supplied, then they become the horizontal and vertical radii for an elliptical corner. [continue reading…]
Whiteboarding exercises. If you interview for a programming position, you will face a whiteboarding challenge. Whether you are interviewing for your first programming job or interviewing for your next programming job, you will have to ace the coding whiteboard exercise. I have created a series of videos that show you how to ace the whiteboard exercise.
I have created a series of four videos that cover the topics of HTML, CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. Please watch these videos so they can help you prepare for your coding whiteboard interview.
