How i got certified: CS50M from Harvard
I recently got certified in CS50’s Mobile App Development with React Native and here are my thoughts.
I started off on an audit track on edx and very soon realized this is how i want to learn. Emphasis on how rather than what. Even sooner, i realized if i don’t opt for the certified track i probably won’t be able to finish it — but i wanted to finish it.
The course starts off with JavaScript overview and ends with deploying react native app — which is quite a breath to cover. Soon after JS we dive into web development with imperative style of coding where you have handle all dom manipulation manually and also make sure that side effects of any computation is correctly reflected in the dom. Now enter the react way of doing things a.k.a. the declarative style where you tell the browser how the app should look like and you got it!
React opens up several interesting topics like state management via redux, why you need a middleware (redux thunk) what happens when you reload? persist state!
From react it takes you directly to react native. Not very different at first — only difference being you cannot use html components anymore, which makes sense. For react native navigation, we had lecturers from Expo and react — the same people who has implemented the library.
Digging deeper, we saw performance optimized flat lists and ScrollViews. Explored different ways of debugging the app using chrome dev tools and styling mobile apps just like the web ones!
I ended up submitting 4 projects: 1 using imperative style todo app and 3 react native apps —a pomodoro timer, a movie browser and final app (of my choice)
For final submission, i chose a TODO app (yet again!). i chose it because i had to implement the following:
- Must use
redux - Must make at least one network call
- Must have at least one stack navigator
- Must have at least one tab navigator
- Must be at least as large in scope as the previous projects
And a todo app checks all the boxes! Almost forgot, i had to upload YouTube videos where i had to explain my implementation.
