FullStackOpen - Part 4

1. Intro

I finally wrapped up Part 4 of FullStackOpen, which dives into backend testing and user authentication.
Lots of opportunities here to deepen my understanding and practice concepts I’d only touched on in other courses — but this time in a more project-oriented way.

I know I should write more tests, but I’m also starting to understand why testing is such a debated topic. On smaller solo projects, it’s tempting to just rely on console.log() debugging instead. Still, it’s something I need to work on — along with code organization and project structure in general.

Thinking about picking up a book like Clean Code or The Pragmatic Programmer next.

2. Key Learnings

Testing Basics

• Writing unit and integration tests
• Supertest is powerful, but test files can get messy fast — need to read more about best practices
• Realization: I’m not a fan of testing yet, but I should keep doing it anyway

Middleware & Token Auth

• Using middleware for cleaner code
• Working with .env files
• Hashing passwords

Project Structure

• Splitting routes, controllers, and services — I really need to get better at this
• Avoiding spaghetti code
• Writing comments (future me will thank present me)

3. Challenges

• Remembering async/await in every test 🤦🏻
• Tiny mistakes (like forgetting to pass req.params.id) can cost hours of debugging. → Lesson learned: step away, take breaks. Pomodoro works.

4. Closing Thought

I really like the project-based, less “hand-holding” approach of FullStackOpen so far.
And even better: I earned my first certificate for the course 🎉

It may not seem like much, but for me, it’s a solid start.