#yyshen

Hi there! I'm Yang, and I like programming and entertaining people.

A few weeks ago, I learned of the existence of a social media site called Tumblr. Being bored at the moment, entered the url tumblr.com and checked out the website. And it was absolutely amazing.

Tumblr has the most beautiful UI I have ever seen. So I started going to tumblr.com just to look at the UI and scroll down the newsfeed, looking at the rounded edges and observing how the profile pictures stuck to the top of the page and were replaced by the ones from the next post.

After a few weeks of this, I decided I might just as well make a Tumblr account. And if I was going to have a Tumblr account, I might as well start a blog to hone my writing skills while simultaneously using Tumblr!

So here I am. Writing my first blog post ever (and my first post on any social media site!).

I intend for this to be a tech blog, since it makes sense for me to write about something I already know a lot about (programming). I will post updates on cool programming projects that I am doing every Wednesday and Saturday, at 7pm Pacific Time.

Greetings, dear reader! You may be wondering why I've missed Wednesday's post. Well, probably not, as I miss or am late for nearly all of my Wednesday posts. But for those of you who are wondering, I was violently sick. I won't go too much into the details here, as no one wants to hear about that sort of stuff. Just know that I had some issues relating to my stomach.

But there is good news! Remember the project I announced at the start of the week? Well, it's complete. I haven't figured out how to host it on a domain yet, but you can check it out here! This is the first thing I've made with NodeJS that actually works, so I'm pretty hyped to find out what you guys think.

Next week I'm going back to work on Ping. But until then, I'm going to fully enjoy the rest of my vacation. My family just got a subscription to Netflix for the first time in two years, and there's this great show called Brooklyn Nine-Nine that I want to watch.

Have a great day!

Hey everybody! Hopefully, this post finds you ready for some entertainment after a long day.

You know how sometimes, you send a friend messages and they don't respond? And you know how you're left wondering wether they really haven't checked their phones yet, or wether they're actually ignoring your messages?

Well, Ping is gonna solve all that. The idea is, every time you want to attract someone's attention, you can Ping them and they'll receive a nice, loud and visible notification with a short message. If they don't respond to you then, then you can be sure they're purposefully ignoring you.

This application will eliminate all the guesswork involved in chat messaging, and replace it with a bunch of fights involving people mad at being ignored.

Here's the Github repository. It's empty at the moment because I'm still working on the layout, but I'm going to have some code in it by tommorow.

So, progress on Ping's going a bit slowly. Maybe it's because it's my first React project, because I have no idea how to perform user authentication, because I insist on trying to listen to French music and code at the same time, or a combination on these factors. But the point is, I've got nothing done except some of the front end so far.

I give the 3 people who have liked my previous post my sincerest apologies. I will perfectly understand if you throw your hands up in exasperation, say to yourself "another gosh darn overambitious amateur coder!", and unfollow me. I can only promise that I will try my absolute best to have the user auth and contacts list done by next Wednesday. But there is some good news!

I am happy to announce that there are now 2 people working on Ping! That's right. @TechLionDev, one of my Github followers, saw that I created a repository for Ping, and asked to work with me on the project. So this will hopefully speed up the process and give me some juicy software updates to deliver to you by Wednesday.

Have a great day!

(tl;dr at bottom)

First off, I want to apologise to all of my readers (if any, I don't have any delusions that people actually read my long articles) for missing Wednesday's post. I have been desperately trying to build a user authentication system, but failed miserably due to reasons mentioned later in the article.

Alright, I know what you're thinking. "What the heck, Yang? You've just started this project for one gosh darned week and you're shelving it already? What kind of a developer are you?". Before I continue with this post, I just want to clarify I'm not binning Ping-I'm just gonna stop working on it very temporarily.

Now, on with the essay. Let me explain. I call myself a developer, because for the past 6 months I have been learning front-end web development and building a bunch of neat projects. Only problem with that is, my knowledge of web development goes only as far as the eye can see. Literally. I can't code anything other than pretty webpages.

In retrospect, it was a hecking bad idea trying to build a full-stack application with no knowledge of the back end. But I tried- and I've failed. But this doesn't mean that I'm going to give up on Ping.

Based on the very little I know about back-end development, I think that if knowing Node.js is enough to build basic back-end functionality such as user authentication, databases, etc. And it so happens that I know of a good Node.js tutorial from FreeCodeCamp. So this weekend, I will sit through the 8-hour video, and emerge having metamorphosed into a full-stack developer.

Welcome, dear reader, to my latest blog post. I come today to bring you great news. After 2 weeks of empty promises and shattered hopes of receiving actual programming content, there has finally been some progress with Ping.

Not very significant progress, mind you. Well, it's significant for me. It took me a whole week to get to this point. But judging from all the coding tutorials I have watched (and failed to learn anything from, except that I suck at following tutorials) everyone else is leagues ahead.

You're probably wondering: "What's this great big thing that Yang has done and that has taken him 3 paragraphs to get to?" Well, I made a MongoDB database. Apparently, MongoDB databases are not called databases-they're called clusters. And each cluster can have multiple databases. And inside these databases are collections and fields. That's a hekking weird system, and also part of the reason it's taken me so long to just make a database. But, Ping now has a database and that's the point.

Things are also looking up. I'm following my 8-hour Node.js tutorial, and learning about Express.js, async functions, POST requests and whatnot. I'm also watching a lot of those videos where people make cool projects with seemingly little effort.

Another piece of good news. I live in Asia, and it is now the Lunar New Year-which means I get a week off schoolwork, and a week for doing epic coding. Hopefully this means that you all will be receiving some juicier content than this soon.

Have a great day!