Until now I think I’ve hardly written about anything but ruby or ruby on rails. That’s partly because the first 3 weeks were mainly focused on this, but also because at first I had this idea in my head that Front End work would fit less with me. I don’t see myself as very visually creative, so I assumed that would make it hard to enjoy doing Front End work. This week was gonna prove me how wrong I was about that once again.
Our main project for the week was to build a project manager. And not just that, we were gonna build it in a completely new language: React.js We have this awesome JavaScript teacher, who was also in charge of introducing us to React. He really took us right through the basics and had me at least getting the concept pretty quickly.
It’s funny though how through these weeks I kept going through these continuous stages of thinking “damn I get it!” to “oh wait..no I don’t”. Cause after a pretty good first day where we set up our initial app and components, the second day brought more and more confusion about what was actually going on with handing down props and a lot of this’s flying around. I felt myself getting closer and closer to that nutty professor stage I talked about earlier.. Thankfully I recognized the feeling this time and figured it was better to really try and regrasp the concept of how it all worked before writing another letter of code. A very clear explanation from a fellow student who had just had one of those “aha” moments later (you rock Tjin!) I had a clear head again. But I also realized we had to basically rewrite most of our code from scratch since too much had been added without really knowing what it all did. It was gonna be another long night..
For the backend we build a simple RESTful API in rails, where projects and their tasks would be stored and rendered in JSON. It was a really good feeling to see that after 3 weeks Rails already felt so familiar that we had this up and running in no time without any real issues. This also gave me the chance to really spend time on learning React. Maybe I’m starting to repeat myself but man it was fun again! The same puzzling your way to the next step, the same trying to come up with efficient ways to get something to work. I’m starting to see a pattern here..
Another thing I really enjoyed this week was being able to help other students who hadn’t had that “aha” moment yet. It’s really a lot of fun to be able to help somebody go from being completely frustrated to thinking wait I think I basically get it now. And trying to explain what’s in your head to somebody else actually makes you understand what your talking about even more too.
We ended the week with a well functioning project manager that, especially after some secret zooming in during demo’s, looked pretty good too!
One last thing I wanted to add. Whenever you’re stuck or feel like you’re losing sight of what you’re doing, but actually just always before you start working on something, draw it out. It took some time for me to realize this, but this week made it clear to me how important it is. It just makes it so much simpler to see the flow of things and to always know in what part of the code you’re working. Just a simple glance at what you drew out or wrote down and you will remember what you were doing and why. And don’t make the excuse that you’re not good at drawing or whatever, I mean trust me my 4 year old draws better faces than I do.
Check out our project manager in action.
Or look through our code at Github: