Job search update and NPM Packages

This week I had a check-in with my career advisor. She gave me a critique on my finished portfolio and gave me some other strategies to use when reaching out to recruiters on Linkedin. While my portfolio is finished, there were some small changes I wanted to make to it and ran into trouble getting the changes deployed. I figured since it was hosted by Github all I had to do was push my changes to the main branch of my repository, but then ended up stumped that the changes weren’t being reflected on the deployed website. In the end I found that the simple solution was that I had to run the deploy command again in the terminal. This got the changes updated to my website!

For the technical portion of this blog we will talk about NPM packages! Like the Ruby Gems discussed in the last blog, NPM software packages work like Ruby Gems, in that you can find many different packages that bundle re-usable code to use in your own projects. NPM stands for Node Package Manager and is used for JavaScript projects. It is also the default package manager for Node.js. To install an NPM package, you must use the command line in the folder of the project you wish to install to, and write the following:

npm install PACKAGE-NAME

replacing PACKAGE-NAME with the name of what you want installed. You can then go to the package-lock.json file in the root of you project folder to make sure it installed correctly and see what version was installed. Another way to install NPM packages is by editing your package.json file, adding the name of the package and version under dependencies as seen here:

{
  "name": "divelog-frontend",
  "version": "0.1.0",
  "private": true,
  "dependencies": {
    "@testing-library/jest-dom": "^5.14.1",
    "@testing-library/react": "^11.2.7",
    "@testing-library/user-event": "^12.8.3",
    "axios": "^0.21.1",
    "moment": "^2.29.1",
    "react": "^17.0.2",
    "react-dom": "^17.0.2",
    "react-redux": "^7.2.4",
    "react-router": "^5.2.0",
    "react-router-dom": "^5.2.0",
    "react-scripts": "4.0.3",
    "redux": "^4.1.0",
    "redux-thunk": "^2.3.0",
    "web-vitals": "^1.1.2"
  }

then type the following into the command line:

npm install

NPM packages can also be installed globally to your computer so you can use them with every project you work on, for instance I have Redux and Redux-thunk installed globally on my machine since I frequently use it with every React project I am working on. TO do a global install of a package, in your command prompt type the following:

npm install -g PACKAGE-NAME

the -g flags the install as global.

To search and browse different packages that may be vital to your projects, you can go to the NPM page here:

https://www.npmjs.com/

For more documentation about NPM see the documents page on npm website here:

https://docs.npmjs.com/about-packages-and-modules