I’m going to keep this post relatively short to keep myself from unravelling into a rant about my frustrations with the Javascript curriculum. In short, I thought the second half of this section’s materials did an incredibly poor job of preparing us to fulfill the requirements of the JS project. According to our cohort lead, the next edition of the curriculum will be completely overhauling this section, so hopefully most of the issues I had will be resolved at that point.
I suppose if there is one good thing that came out of this project experience, it was another opportunity to practice my debugging skills. After weeks of playing with Pry, it took some adjusting to juggling debuggers and breakpoints in the console; and even more so once we had to integrate the JS back into Rails. However, it’s forced me to really search out errors in as many places as possible when the first one doesn’t come back with the clues I need. I had an “exciting” moment when I was scanning my terminal’s responses while running the rails server and stumbled upon an error message I hadn’t realized would appear there. No matter how convoluted the code can get, having so many different debugging tools makes it so much easier to pick the issues apart and tackle them with confidence.