In 2018, Walker Forrester of Loganville, Georgia, completed the Georgia Tech coding boot camp and earned a certificate in full stack web development. "Full stack" means the whole thing: the pages people see in a browser, the server code that runs behind them, and the database that holds the information. The best record of what he learned is the code he wrote, and most of it is still public on his GitHub account, under the name walkforr.
Here is a look at what he built.
GrocerEasy: farmers markets in one place
GrocerEasy was a team project, the second major project of the course, built by Walker and three classmates. The idea came from a simple problem. More people want to know where their food comes from and want to buy locally grown, fresh food from local businesses, but the information about farmers markets was scattered.
GrocerEasy pulled it together. A user picks a location, either their current one or a zip code of their choosing, and the app shows the nearest farmers markets. A search box filters those markets by product, so someone looking for a specific item can see which nearby markets sell it. Selecting a market shows its opening hours and website. The team even built an optional sign-up for updates about new markets in the area.
It was built with JavaScript, HTML and CSS, and it is a good example of what the boot camp taught: take a real need, find the data, and build something a person could use.
Employee Finder: matching by the numbers
Employee Finder works, as Walker put it in his notes, "basically like a dating app" for coworkers. A user fills out a survey, and the app compares their answers with everyone on the company roster to find the closest match.
The logic is spelled out in the project's README. The app adds up each person's scores, measures the difference between the new user and every other employee (using absolute values, so nothing goes negative), and picks the smallest difference. There is a small trap in that approach: the closest match to the user is always the user, with a difference of zero. Walker's code handles it by leaving the user out before looking for the lowest score. It is the kind of detail that shows someone thinking a problem through, not just copying a pattern.
Awesome Places: his first mobile app
Awesome Places was Walker's first React Native app, meaning it runs on phones rather than in a browser. Users make an account, log in, and post a photo and a location, either where they are or somewhere they choose on a map.
Under the hood it used Firebase for user accounts, the database and photo uploads, Redux to manage the app's state, and react-native-maps for the map. Moving from web pages to a mobile app with logins and photo storage was a real step up, and he took it near the end of 2018.
Stores, directories and a portfolio
Several smaller projects round out the collection:
- An eCommerce store built on a MongoDB database.
- An e-commerce website built with Sequelize, a library for working with SQL databases. Building a store twice, on two different kinds of database, is a good way to learn how each one works.
- An employee directory written in plain JavaScript, with no frameworks, that could view the employee list, add or delete someone, and check whether a person was already in it.
- A developer portfolio built with React.
Why it matters
Taken together, these projects cover the full range the boot camp promised: front ends in HTML, CSS and JavaScript; server code in Node.js; both MongoDB and SQL databases; and React on the web and on phones. When the course ended, Walker thanked his instructor for leading the class "every step of the way" and wished his classmates the best.
The code is still there for anyone who wants to read it, at github.com/walkforr, and the projects page has a short summary of each app.