For my final project of the Flatiron Curriculum, I had the privilege of learning React/Redux front end web development. I know I have said this every project, but this was by far the most difficult project I have come across for a multitude of reasons. The first being, my passion is back end development because it logically makes a lot of sense to me as far as picturing what I am creating, and talking myself through the relationships. I am not the most “creative” person, so neededing to visualize what I will be rendering and creating is a task in itself, and it is hard to learn the syntax while still learning the creative process as well. It was also a very in-depth framework that had a lot of differences from regular javascript in my opinion. This is one subject that when I graduate, I will definitely be reviewing my first few weeks of github pushes for my job search. I will be making sure to really iron out my gaps in knowledge that I know are there, and continue using my personal resources that have been linked to me, and referencing the people I know who currently develop in this language. I am looking forward to becoming better at this, but it really helped show me my love for back-end development and the flow difference between the two.
Promises - “A Promise is an object representing the eventual completion or failure of an asynchronous operation. Essentially, a promise is a returned object you attach callbacks to, instead of passing callbacks into a function.”
Whoa, where to start with this one… Learning JavaScript has by far been the most difficult task throughout the bootcamp thus far. I felt lost most of the way through, and needed quite a lot of external resources. I am happy that it ended up that way though, because it showed me that I can use the internet to find resources for anything if you dig deep enough, and spend enough time looking. I found almost every niche fix to what I was doing for every lesson in different places, and from what I have heard from developer friends, that is what a lot of coding is. Once you understand the basics, it is using that knowledge to be able to navigate yourself through endless amounts of information online to find what is relevant to you, and learning through that.
Rails seemed a lot harder for me to grasp initially, compared to Object Oriented Ruby going into Sinatra. I feel like I originally thought that Rails was a lot of unnecessary confusing conecepts, but after learning a few of the tricks and how it can slow the repitition of code, and resuse the same things that you had done before. Towards the end, things started to click but I know that I still really need to work on my understanding of writing forms. Muscle memory will be the best practice for that, because I would love to know the basics of the syntax without looking it up. I know that this is not a taboo practice, but it is something that is done so frequently that I would love to be a little bit better at the memorization of it. I am very happy with how my project turned out, and I am looking forward to bootstrapping and styling it a little bit to eventually have it go live for a few friends of mine to play around on.
Overall, I enjoyed the Sinatra Project. I felt like this project was a lot more under control than my last one, and I could visualize what I was doing with my code. I felt like I had a direct path and it helped my lack of experience to be able to logically build my project in my head, and then go step by step creating what was needed. There were definitely times that I was getting upset here, but I knew that time would be made, and the students I was also working with seemed to skate by with me as well. I feel like the nights were not filled with worry about completing on time, nor was I ever stumped overnight with an issue which was amazing. This project really helped me restore faith in my ability to code and what I will be learning in the future. Being released on to my own doesn’t seem nearly as bad anymore.