Bootcamp Highlights: Web 101 by Walt Lim and William Seagar
Written by Yekti Crow
Walt Lim and William Seagar are colleagues at Swiftly as well as part time Summer of Tech mentors, helping at events like the 2020 Auckland Create Camp. This time, they invited students to learn the basics of how the web works with a practical guide on how to build for the web. Starting from the ground up, students learned how the browser works, with HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript.
Both Will and Walt took us through a short history of the origins of the world wide web.The earliest websites were mainly just information with very limited features. Then evolved into the early social media era when Facebook and Twitter started. Now, we have the world wide web on all sorts of devices including phones, tablets, and PCs. There are now thousands of different computer languages out there and it's always tough to figure out what one to use!During this bootcamp, the 2 speakers also covered the following areas:
- Difference between the front end and back end of code.
- Frontend is what the users see which includes HTML, CSS and Javascript
- Backend focuses on your server and databases
- Common developer stacks (common computer language combinations)
- Live demo of creating a Facebook-like app called "LMAObook"
To finish off the session, Will took us through the backend using NodeJS, HapiJS, MongoDb, Heroku and MongoDB Atlas. Walt showed the students the frontend part of web development using React and Netlify through a live demo.