Sean is Coding #13: Next.JS + LangChain! 🐛

Things are about to get real!

Hey everyone,

Welcome to the latest edition of the Sean is Coding newsletter! At my coding bootcamp, Rithm School, this week marked the end of the formal instruction portion, and we're all collectively moving forward into the "professional projects" phase of the program.

Numbers API

During "project season," as they call it, the goal is to provide us with experience working in a larger, production-level codebase that contains a substantial amount of pre-existing code. My team has been tasked with picking up the Numbers API project, modernizing it, and extending the codebase.

Numbers API is an open-source project that Rithm School acquired a few years ago and now maintains. Our mission is to bring this app up to speed with modern web technologies and practice working comfortably in a large, pre-existing codebase.

Recruiting

In addition to projects, we're also starting to think about recruiting for software engineering jobs as the program draws to a close. I'm excited to get a bit of a break from all-day instruction and, quite frankly, to start talking to people again. I haven't had a chance to put much thought into my resume and portfolio yet, so I'm really looking forward to having a bit more time to dedicate to that effort.

Next.JS + LangChain

Since we didn't have an assessment this past weekend, I seized the opportunity to get acquainted with Next.JS and LangChain, two technologies I've been eager to gain more experience with. So far, I've deployed a basic Tic Tac Toe app using Vercel that mostly works, but it needs a lot more refinement before it's ready for prime time.

Next.JS is an amazing framework overall. Its approach to handling routing is incredibly straightforward and clever. I'm also loving the idea of using serverless functions for handling tasks like backend API calls without the need to build and deploy an entire server instance.

LangChain has streamlined the process of working with the OpenAI LLM, making it much easier to incorporate into projects. Over the coming weeks, I plan to flesh out my portfolio by expanding on some of the more backend-intensive projects we started in Rithm, and by extending some of the side project ideas I began experimenting with during my downtime in the program.

It's hard to believe that the program will be wrapping up in just six short weeks. The time seems to have flown by, but I'm genuinely excited to use this period to focus on applying what I've learned to build out my portfolio and establish a solid foundation for entering the job market.

As always, thanks for following along!

Sean