Back-End section and projects need updates

I noticed a few things when going through the Information Security and Quality Assurance Projects:

  • The API for the Stock Price Checker doesnt exist anymore. I found this article that talks about available sotck market apis, but I have yet to check if it works with the tests:
  • The projects are not in a order of increasing difficulty, which I think would help greatly with the complexity of the topics. We can just pick randomly a project to work on, but the obvious order is to start at the top, but after the first project the incremental difficulty steps are not educational. Right now they are:

Metric-Imperial Converter
Issue Tracker
Personal Library
Stock Price Checker
Anonymous Message Board

But actually the difficulty rises like this:

Metric-Imperial Converter (test suites)
Stock Price Checker (api calls)
Personal Library (database)
Issue Tracker (more complex database)
Anonymous Message Board (even more complex database)

  • The website with the tests that is linked on the announcement for the projects is not mentioned anywhere on the description for the projects. Is that on purpose? I found especially those tests to be helpful in understanding what I am supposed to do and to find errors. I am talking about this site:

https://pricey-hugger.glitch.me/

The links for the examples use .gomix.me instead of glitch.me. I think I would add a link to it to the projects descriptions.

  • The Advanced Node and Express section is clumsy to work through. Every description starts with:

“As a reminder, this project is being built upon the following starter project on Glitch, or cloned from GitHub.”

I dont think thats necessary or helpful, because we can continue the same project after remixing the initial one to go through the tests. At least up to “Set up the Environment” because thats where the starter project suddenly is completely different. I htink thats where a break happens, I am not 100% sure anymore. It would be more helpful to mention starter projects only once and then again when a different one is used.

I found this whole section not pleasant to work through and it might be a bit telling that the descriptions itself occasionally mention a link to the completed code up to this point. The instructions go from “copy-paste this into your code” to “ok now you are on your own”.

  • The issue with “As a reminder, this project is being built upon the following starter project on Glitch, or cloned from GitHub.” happens on every Back-End challenge, its not helpful because the link doesn’t lead you back to your own remixed glitch code, but opens a new one every single time. You end up with loads of remixed sites on your glitch profile. Again, just one time mentioning it on the first challenge is more useful.

  • I found some weird writing in the descriptions a lot of times. I can imagine that this is a perfect example for first-timers to fix. Unfortunately i didnt write down which challenges they were… curse me! :wink:
    I noticed this in the Apis And Microservices and in the Information Security And Quality Assurance section. Quality Assurance and Testing with Chai sometimes has weird formatting, sometimes no description at all and most of the times just a brief sentence. Of course you can only explain so much about these tests, but still.

This became a long post…my overall impression with the backend section is that it needs an overhaul of the descriptions.

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I agree for the most part.

I’m glad someone is saying something! This is my first time through these, and I am finding myself doing a lot of floundering…
I’ve been working on the time stamp project, but I feel that the use cases are a bit soft and I can’t figure out how to submit my glitch project!

I’ve been searching through the forums, but this is the first relevant/up-to-date conversion I came across.
Have you found other resources? Have you found other posts clarifying things?

Thanks!

What are your issues with submitting the project? Do you mean the github link?

Yeah. I have my project on Glitch. I thought I would just paste that link, FCC would do their test, and hooray!
I took a peak at the rest of the back end projects and they don’t seem to be updated?? Is there a beta posted that is more up to date?

There are no tests besides https://pricey-hugger.glitch.me , which seems to be a leftover from when fcc was testing the bew projects, but it mostly works for running tests on our own projects.

If you want to get your Glitch project to GitHub you have to create a new repository on GitHub, create it with the Readme file because you need one or Glitch will complain. Then in Glitch after opening your project you click on your project name in the top left , then at the bottom of the popup you click on Advanced Options and there is the Export to Github button. Now you can chose your repository and Glitch will create a new pull request which you can just merge on GitHub.

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Thanks for the link, perhaps it work with my future projects.
Thanks for the github tip, too!
It seems like not many campers are doing the backend projects?

I just finished the Api’s and Microservices certification. I’m moving on to Information Security now, and I was just checking the sample glitch given for the Metric-Imperial Converter, and noticed that it’s only a listing directory: https://hard-twilight.glitch.me/

Has anyone done this one?

It seems like the original owner deleted parts of this project…

This is the actual project:

Maybe someone knows him personally and can contact him, I will write him a mail now anyway, this is him:

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@guiKailu I’m working through the Information Security and Quality Assurance Projects now. I’m just about done with the Metric-Imperial Converter. I agree with the sentiment of this chain. The Metric-Imperial Converter doesn’t have a good example to go off of, and a few parts of the challenge are unclear on what is required.

Here’s my Glitch on the converter project. Feel free to provide feedback.

What are your issues with submitting the project?

For all of you looking for a way to test your back end projects - there is still no official way to test them, and any link you paste as a sollution will be validated as correct. It is still an ongoing FCC issue.

However, there are tests made by the community that you can use. I’m not 100% sure all those tests are well written, but for now it’s all we’ve got.

You can test your APIs and Microservices Projects here: https://narrow-plane.glitch.me/
And you can test Information Security and Quality Assurance Projects here: https://pricey-hugger.glitch.me/