My project begins early Monday. I had a rough idea of what to expect; late nights and coffee, the gritting of teeth as I jitterily struggle on the various topics I could design. The Project was simple enough in theory, or maybe I am understating what is at hand. Either way, my experience that has led me to this point would come as the single most motivational tool and that isn’t my knowledge of coding. My determination would be my key to success.
In the beginning of learning at flatiron, I really didn’t know much of anything. I had played around with Game Maker Studio with a few friends writing some code here and there for a platformer game. I had an absolute blast, and although game making or playing isn’t my passion, I knew I had planted the seed in my head. I wanted to make something… something with meaning. Fast forward to the first project I would be completing. It has now been long enough that the school has figured we can be trusted to build a SPA (single page application). The requirements were simple, must be HTML/CSS/JS frontend, and it must have the use of an Event Listener such as a “ like button”.
So I am off to the races and already am running into more errors and problems than I ever would have imagined. I hadn’t honestly spent enough time learning CSS and HTML and unlike many others, my High School had never offered a class on it. This was all new to me. I failed over and over again until I scraped together the most hideous page I believe anyone has ever seen. So I started over. I started Googling different CSS / HTML templates I could use to get a better idea. When that failed, I started looking up ways to more efficiently set up my HTML file. Until this point I had been manually typing out the entirety of ‘<!DOCTYPE html>’, this is when I learned I could simply type ‘!’ and hit Enter and it would autofill. Somehow while learning JavaScript I had completely missed this little tidbit.
Moving on. My next major crisis came Friday. I had a rough draft for my SPA using an API that I found from google. I hadn’t done nearly enough research on the site because I had missed the section about paying for call’s that were being made. At this point I truly was wondering If coding was going to be a hobby or my future. Something probably everyone else was well aware of, I had slipped up on. I Decided to restart my entire project from scratch. I admittedly and reluctantly deleted my files knowing I would waste time jumping between the two projects trying to salvage poorly written code and it would ultimately cause more mistakes.
So I began anew. I had a simple idea, once again, for a project that I could use myself. It was going to be a really simplistic weather App. Not only could I turn this in, but I could continue to build off it in the future. Adding more features, while keeping the app sleek and simple, modern and efficient. I proceeded to watch and re-watch videos from Flatiron and Youtube. This time I wouldn’t have time to redo a project from scratch.
I honestly only had one more difficulty after watching hours of material over. I wanted an Event to happen when I clicked on the temperature. I wanted a Calculation to happen that would take the degrees in Celsius and display it as Fahrenheit. This was solved with enough Googling and playing around. I finally set a ballin back ground image known as BG.jpg and was pretty happy with my progress overall.
I really feel that through this project, I have learned so much. More so than the pervious 4 weeks of school combined. You can do assignments as much as you want for practice, but the real challenge is when you have to code something from scratch in a language you aren’t familiar with for the first time ever. At the end of this, I am alive and healthy and I will be here to code another day.
