The MEAN Stack – A New Direction for Crooked Code!

It’s been about 8 months since I began the Crooked Code blog…  And so far it’s been a great experience!

While the overall purpose for writing the Crooked Code blog has been, and will continue to be, helping others learn to code, most of the posts fall under one of two major themes…

The first of these themes has been articles covering Algorithm Scripting Challenges in the Free Code Camp curriculum. Two of the most popular of these posts, based on pageviews, have been Symmetric Difference and Map the Debris.

The second major theme has been tutorials on JavaScript, including the Rubber Ducking Series I started a couple months ago based on (but not affiliated with) ‘You Don’t Know JS’.

Where to go from here??
Where to go from here??

While I plan to continue adding JavaScript tutorials, particularly the Rubber Ducking Series, I’m planning on putting a temporary hold on new posts covering Free Code Camp algorithms.

As you may have heard, Free Code Camp has announced they are adding a major expansion to their curriculum. A look at the current map of the beta version shows that many of the advanced algorithms will be supplemental to the main program.

Because of this, I’ve decided to wait until the beta is released into production before I continue writing up more algorithm challenges, as I have no way of knowing which challenges will make the final cut.

I am, however, very excited to announce that I’ve decided to add a third major theme here at Crooked Code – Angular 2 (ng2) and the MEAN stack.

Angular 2

I’m doing this for several reasons…

First, about 90% of my focus lately has been on learning Angular 2.  It’s the first JS framework I’ve learned, so the process has been a long one, and judging by many of the comments I’ve seen throughout the FCC community, I’m not the only one on this journey.  Which brings me to my second reason…

The final release of ng2 is so recent, many of the tutorials and videos out there are a mix of earlier release candidates and the final release all mashed together…

This causes some major confusion in building a working ng2 app, particularly in how to structure the project.  So I hope to shed some light on what I’ve found and save others some of the time I’ve spent (and continue to spend) making sense of it all.

MongoDB, express, Angular2 and NodeJS
MongoDB, express, Angular 2 and NodeJS

Further, I plan to highlight how the ng2 frontend framework ties into the rest of the MEAN stack.

Now that I’ve spent some time digging into Angular 2 on a deeper level, I’m planning on using my previous experience with Node, Express and MongoDB (with Mongoose) to build larger full stack apps.  I think this will be a great opportunity to share what I’m learning with the Crooked Code community.

That’s all for now,

-Jeremy