Adding new skill set experience of ExpressJS, and general NPM-fu, by following this YouTube ExpressJS Crash Course, done by Brad Traversy of Traversy Media.
I coded alongside the video, pausing often and retyping myself. This allows me to reflect upon the code, solidifying the knowledge & understanding of this skill.
In my typical Ian-fashion, I've performed git commits at conceptual landmarks (visible here) as the video progressed. These allow easy review of concepts on subsequent sessions, ensuring I have a high quality of understanding & retention.
I decided some workflows early on. For personal projects like this, I try to minimize commiting other's libaries. I like meaningful statistics on myself, so when I see github's breakdown that this project is "JavaScript 74.1%, HTML 25.9%", I want to know it's all mine and not overshadowed by the large libraries I imported.
So as JavaScript libraries are proliferant and are necessary dependencies, I came up the below solution to keep my github statistics purely my own typed code. I must clarify, I strictly did this exclusively because it was solely a tiny practice project. If this project were even a little more complicated, or more unique, or more collaborative, I would be eagerly conforming to normal conventions of including dependencies instead as a teamplayer. Treat this as an outlier that was never intended to follow industry norms for dependency management.
<nerdy-stuff>
I made sure to learn to use npm install <lib> -g (the -g flag is for globally-installing a single copy on your system), combined with npm link <lib> (which makes symlink in your project folder to point to that library), and finally combined to customize the .gitignore file to specifically ignore that link (without which would've pulled all that stuff back into the commit, defeating my goal). Also, I discovered I couldn't use npm's --save flag simultaneously with the -g flag, so I manually updated the package.json file with each required package as I progressed through the content, with the dependencies used with the various requires.
</nerdy-stuff>
The author chose to use ejs due to it's lightweight syntax requiring little extra knowledge beyond basic HTML. In the future I want to avoid duplicating the field names so much in both the front-end and back-end by exploring different templating frameworks, or alternatively I will learn how to configure better IDE-support for interlinking declarations from each end bidirectionally. I want that perfect syntax highlighting of all embedded templating languages.
I started the project on a desktop computer with a brief commit history, but didn't push to github. Then at another session I decided to restart at a coffee shop, once I confirmed there exists a simple workflow to merge two separate git repositories, here.
