072 - CS50 Course Review & Wrapping Up My Node/Express App

In this episode I’m wrapping up a few loose ends: the final report on my first from-scratch Node application, and a course review of Harvard’s CS50: Intro to Computer Science.

NOTE: The CS50 course review starts about 9 minutes in!

Node/Express App Part 3

To catch up from where we left off…

Part One: 035 - New Node Express Project - First Steps
Part Two: 043 - Node Express Project - Progress Report

As I kept working on the project, I learned quite a bit about working with dates in programming (hint: not a straightforward endeavor!), and had a frustrating attempt at deploying on Amazon Web Services.

But eventually I was able to successfully deploy the app using Heroku, and overall by the time all was said and done I had a working application that I actually still use to this day!

CS50 - Intro To Computer Science Course Review

CS50 is the introductory computer science course offered at Harvard University, and it’s available for anyone around the world to take for free on the EdX learning platform. It covers a lot of basic topics to build an understanding of how computers, networks, and applications work. My favorite aspects of the course were:

They have an honor code which discourages people from posting their homework solutions online. As a result, when I searched or asked for help solving the problem sets, I got nudged in the right direction rather than being given the answers full out. I learned a lot more this way.
The presentation is very high quality—they have an excellent media player for the weekly lectures, and lots of supplemental materials to make sure the concepts stick.
Learning CS fundamentals (data structures, big O notation, HTTP, etc.) has really helped my understanding of other topics like git, Node.js, writing functions, using hex color codes, and much more.

If you’re interested in taking the class, prepare yourself for a lot of work and time if you really want to make the most of it!