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The Secret to Becoming a Better Programmer is Speaking

Malcolm Gladwell penned the concept of the 10,000 hour rule in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. The principle holds that to become world-class in any field, you need to complete 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice”.

There is a secret that will allow you to bypass the 10,000 hours rule and allow you to become a much better programmer. That secret is speaking.

Experience Matters in Programming

Programming is one of the fields where experience matters. Just writing code for the sake of coding for 10,000 hours will not make you a skilled and valued programmer.

Programmers learn by:

  • reading books
  • completing online tutorials
  • attending training or conferences
  • Programmers gain experience by applying what they learn.

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Saving Data to MongoDB Database from Node.js Application Tutorial

The MEAN stack is used to describe development using MongoDB, Express.js, Angular.jS and Node.js. In this tutorial I will show you how to use Express.js, Node.js and MongoDB.js. We will be creating a very simple Node application, that will allow users to input data that they want to store in a MongoDB database. It will also show all items that have been entered into the database.

Before we get started I will describe a few terms that you will frequently hear when creating a MEAN stack application. After that we will start building our example.

CRUD

CRUD is an acronym that means Create, Read, Update and Delete. It is used to describe the process of having your data persisted into a database. In this example you will be providing examples of Creating new data into the database and then Reading the data from the database.

Restful API

A RESTful API is an application program interface that uses HTTP requests to GET, PUT, POST and DELETE data. We will be using an API to define when we add data to our database and when we read from the database.

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Example using EJS Templating in Node.js Application

EJS, embedded javascript, is a templating language. EJS combines data and a template to produce HTML. One of the most important feature in EJS is the use of partials. Partials allow you to define something once and then apply it to any page in your application.

I will show you how to create a simple Node.js application that uses EJS as the templating engine. Then we will create 2 pages for the website. We will use partials to build out our head, navigation, footer and content.

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How well do you really know CSS?

Many people that have created their own website or blog consider themselves really good with CSS. The question is how well do you really know CSS?

Take this challenge and see how well you can answer these questions on CSS. At the end I have given answers to all of the CSS questions.

Good luck and let's sell how well you really know CSS.

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Jumpstart Development with the use of Generators

Any time you need to start a new development project from scratch you will find yourself writing the same basic set of code over and over. There is a better - and faster - way of overcoming that shortcoming by using generators.

Generators are pre-packed sets of code that give you the basic framework that you will need in your project. There are many different generators that are available for you to use.

Most of my projects run using the MEAN stack. The MEAN stack is an abbreviation for a project that uses MongoDB, Express, AngularJS and Node.js.

When writing projects I go through the same process of setting up the server, installing Angular and configuring authentication for my project. What if there is a way to start any MEAN stack project with all of this done for you?

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