A conversational transcript of a March 3, 2025 YouTube video by Phil Choi about building an app and practical software‑engineering topics for developers breaking into tech. Phil and a co‑speaker discuss wireframing (Excalidraw), React Native UI details, admin panels, interview resources, and foundational backend/frontend integration topics—especially HTTP/REST methods (GET/POST/PUT/DELETE), tools (Postman, Insomnia), auth tokens (OAuth 2.0, JWT), and a demo that fetches more items from an API.
Chapters
A programmer. I think you see like 100 errors a day. You get kind of desensitized to it. You're like, okay, Been here before. I know how to pull myself out.
Cool.
I'll just. I'll just get done. I think you guys are fucking with me, though, dude.
Dude, what do you mean, bro?
What did he say?
Holy shit. He actually messaged you?
Yeah. Damn. What are you saying, dude? Do some damage control, bro. I said, yeah, no problem. I felt bad for him yelling. He told me about it. I think he's going through a hard time this past weekend. Don't take it personal, but we are building a brand in a company now, so we all need to work hard and be accountable. Why?
Why did you do it so seriously? They were with you, bro.
Are you with me, dude? Yeah. What the. Dude? Be social on. Let's social. Let's connect. That was almost the app name. But let's be social on. Let's social soon. Not yet. We're still building it. What do you think, dude? You know, the app setup is done. I think that's where we left off, but we took a little break, found a designer, but obviously we need to kind of give him a little bit of direction. I just threw him something, and he kind of threw something back, but now we have to actually try. So we're wireframing the app a little bit. I just learned about this really cool wireframing tool, excalidraw. This is gonna be like the login shit, login stuff, and then there's gonna be some onboarding screen and then maybe some post screen. You could have, like, two different views, a list view and a car card view.
Can you show the setting up? Like, how, like, so far, what it looks like?
Yeah. But there is a little bit of a bug on one of the main wrappers I made with, like, the insets because I realized, like, some of the components, if, like, you use a header on react native elements, it already sets the safe area insets for you. My friend is asking me, like, for interview help inside of the Discord, right? There's this. If you guys ever, like, need to go get a job or whatever. Where is everyone, by the way?
Not sure.
They got scared off by the API. Oh, by the way, guys, the admin panel code, I feel like, will be, like, code you'll work on in, like, a real world. I know, like, a lot of junior developers when they could first get their jobs, they're mainly working on admin panels. That's probably what you get thrown in first because, you know, it's, it's not publicly seen. It's seen internal. The regular one? Yeah, the regular one. Yeah. I'm in that one too. Okay, so there's a, there's resources. And then I really like, you're preparing for an interview, Manny or whatever. There's these reverse interview questions. This one's pretty popular, like 27.9 thousand stars, right? And they just give you questions like about the role tech. So like, you know, like you can say, oh, how do you integrate, like deploy, change? If the changes, is it cicd or like, is your infrastructure set up under version control or available as code? And you can kind of like, these are kind of like really good questions for like the part where after the interview they ask you, all right, do you have any questions? You know what I mean? All this kind of stuff. I think it's very important to kind of ask all this kind of stuff. Like not every question, but just like shoes. It's in the resources. So there's a, there's a resources tab under coding. And then it's like one of the first ones we posted when there was like what, 100 people in the Discord channel.
It was a while, it was a while ago.
And yeah, I know, like the admin panel was a little bit of a ramp up. We're talking about it. I feel like the only hard part really for me or that is this dynamic adding of answers, right? That's like the hard part of this. And that's why there was like a lot of code with like replacing nodes and stuff like that. If we static it to 4, it would have been very simple. But the thing is like, this is a very good learning experience. But honestly, it should have been hard because, you know, about, in about three weeks you're gonna look back and you guys are gonna be able to build something cooler. I know I say this, but I'm here to like what, like it could be very comfortable, right? But you have to be uncomfortable to like make it very, to have like progress. Just stick with it and it'll be, it'll be, it'll be worth it. So there's like SMTP for simple mail transfer service, HTTPs, which is just HTTP with an SSL certificate FTP for file transfer protocol. And these are all things you're going to need to really kind of understand. But the big one you have to understand is the HTTP requests because that's like as a developer with backend and front end systems, you're probably going to work with HTTPs, but there's something like, recently called GraphQL, which we'll get into later. I'm not too experienced in GraphQL, but this is another protocol that they've created at Facebook that people are using where you can kind of like make your back end requests and like the data shape of how you want it in the front end. But we'll, we'll talk about that in the future. But today we're going to talk about the HTTP protocol. And definitely if you guys are ever bored, just type in Internet protocols and read about what each one is. If you think it's going to be hard, it's going to be hard. Definitely. Just, I want you guys to. Not everything is digestible. Someone else has done it before and I'm sure you guys can do it too. So there's something, there's a lot of these HTTP servers. So like me, I'm working on. Okay, so this is like, this is the back end that I'm working on right now. So like this is how you create like a rest, Restful API kind of stuff. So you have like a create and you set some kind of path to the protocol that you want to send. So these HTTP requests have methods. They're usually called like a post or put or get or Delete. And there's other ones too like trace and. But I don't really use them. So these four ones are the ones that you have to get used to. Post is to create new, put is to update, get is to read or get, and delete is to delete. So those are the methods with HTTP requests that happen. And if you guys don't have it yet, please, please install this program called Postman or Insomnia. These are the ones that I use. So post. I'll help you guys install that if you guys need in the future. But it's just the place where you can kind of like make these requests. So right, right now it's. This is like hitting my server. This ID token's broken so I have to go get a new one. Which is better, Bolt, Snow or Insomnia? I like Insomnia. It's a little bit easier to configure and it's a little bit faster. My opinion, like, like, I can try to like kill my server sometimes by like pressing it over and over and over again. Postman is definitely like the industry standard, but I think a lot of the newer devs will be looking at Insomnia. It's a little, I think it's a little bit more friendly. The UI as Well, okay, but that's how I did the server protection, through some kind of token. But I'll teach you all about that. But definitely there's some stuff like OAuth 2.0 and like JWT tokens that you kind of have to understand when you are making these HTTP requests. Because that's why I'm talking about it. Because in the back end it is. Honestly I almost feel like, you know, the backend is like a, it's a connection into your database, but you have to protect your database as best you can or because if you get a bunch of like dirty data there, it's gonna ruin your whole project. So by the end of this lesson you guys will understand. So like back in the day they were using something called like XHR. They, they added the fetch API into JavaScript which made it a lot simpler. One problem with working with like requests and stuff, you have something like promises and like these kind of like race conditions and kind of like timing issues. So then they talked about promises. So those are things that we're going to talk about today. I would say HTTP requests and stuff like this is like the bread and butter of front end development. The way you kind of get data onto a website is through these requests. So a PWA will need HTTP requests. Like I made my bread and butter almost on doing these HTTP requests. I know that every front end developer does. But honestly when I was doing front end development rather than the whole UI stuff, I was doing like the more back ending tasks I would say of like hooking up APIs, making the API layer, catching the errors and all this kind of stuff. And now in the back end it really helped me because now I'm creating those APIs two hours later. That's what we created today. We're pulling from an API and we create this user card thing. You guys can try to add this Add more button on the bottom.
Yep.
So you fetch 10 more. Right. So on the bottom you can add this Fetch more button and you can add. And I set it up here so it just makes a request again. So that's it for today. And there's, there are some exercises add project and this is that kind of almost the stuff that you're going to run into every day in code to be honest. This is the code. So appreciate you guys here. I'll see you guys on in the next one.
Yep, yep. And try to, if you have your own like, like interested API, like any interesting API that you want to work with, like try to make your own project like this.
I like the Swappy API.
Yeah, swap.
Star wars API.
There's a Pokemon one too. Pokemon? Yeah. Mustafa made one, I think a while ago.
Right. Just working here. It's getting pretty late. Fixed the main wrapper stuff. I got this kind of working on this screen. I'm still setting up the typescript for my theme, so just gotta keep working, get it done. See in the next one.
