Going into this project, I wanted to learn how to not just code simple static websites, but dynamic sites that can pull information from different API's across the web, and complicated applications that serve a real purpose in a person's day to day life.

I stumbled upon many different stacks of technology to learn from, from LAMP stack to Ruby/ROR to MEAN stack. I settled on learning JavaScript because it seemed to have the biggest growth and has been a strong contender for leading the web application market, even though it is still a relatively new language.

I started learning JavaScript through Codecademy, and it was a great learning experience. Firstly I took the all-purpose JavaScript course, and I was able to pick it up very quickly because of its similarity with Java and C++, those being the basis of my knowledge of OOP and coding in general.

From there, I took the AngularJS course. I won't lie... it was a very challenging course. Trying to understand an MVC framework with no one's to ask questions proved to take longer than I had expected. Thankfully Google is knowledgeable as always and I was able to understand concepts along the way.

The main things I learned was how a JavaScript file communicates information to its HTML counterpart, and how to think the "Angular" way. I used OpenWeatherMap's API to create a very plain looking web app, which serves its purpose.

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The main technologies being used here were Angular-Meteor, MongoDB, and Meteor's User-Accounts API. Prior to this project, I found a video online that demonstrated how easy it was to create a web application when you add Meteor to AngularJS.

After watching many tutorials and reading the docs of Meteor, I half understood half didn't understand how to exactly code the app I was going for. I ended up following many tutorials until I came to the conclusion that is my To-Do List application.

Although Meteor made the process of building the app very automated, I did not feel comfortable using it. To be frank, there were too many "magic lines of code" that simply made the application do what I wanted it to. There were parts of code that I didn't understand but still put in, and it worked as intended.

I had actually thought of creating my own API to generate my own accounts api but halfway through doing research on cryptography practices I realized Meteor had an API just for that. There was no need to use SHA-256 or SHA-512 and incorporate salts and peppers and then add a slowing algorithm to prevent brute force attacks, Meteor just had something that worked.

I have to really give credit to Meteor as it made creating this app scarily easy, and many people could do the same.

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This Chatroom web application was made using Angular-Meteor and borrowed many of the same concepts from my To-Do list app. After realizing the asychronous data was nearly instant and synced between clients, I thought of this project.

The main problems I faced with this was using input from HTML and Angular and putting it into the output of the messages. I picked up JQuery on the fly and became well acquainted with AngularJS's selectors.

I did my best to not refer back to my previous project so I could learn how to independently create an Angular-Meteor application

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The technologies I learned to use while doing freelance include GruntJS, Bower, and many smaller NPM packages such as node-sass, image-minify, browser-sync. Between understanding how a JS taskrunner works and incorporating Sass instead of CSS into my projects, my workflow has greatly improved.

By using browser-sync, Atom and other packages, it improved my overall usability compared to before. And of course, all of this wouldn't be possible unless I was running some version of Linux with a concise understanding of CLI tools.