You only get one chance to make a positive first impression. For software engineers, the README file in your Github repo is your one chance to make a good impression to potential employers. Is your README file leaving the wrong impression?
The Most Important Code Isn’t Code
Your README file is the most important part of your Github Repo. When people visit your repo, the first thing they will do is look at your README file.
If your readme file does not define what your code does, then most users will just skip right over it. In other words, you failed at your chance of making a positive first impression.
What Makes a Good README file?
A good README file should include the following two items.
Description
The description tells visitors exactly what your code does. It does not have to be an epic description that is on par with the length of War and Peace. Instead it should be precise in describing the features found in your code.
I would recommend using short sentences in your description. You can use a bulleted list if you want. Lengthwise it should be between 3–7 sentences long coupled into 1–2 paragraphs.
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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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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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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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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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