Thinking back on this most recent cylce, I don’t think there was a week where I truly felt on pace with the curriculum until I reached project week. Much of Ruby on Rails already felt very familiar thanks to our time with Sinatra, and the sheer volume material introduced in this section slowed my daily progress to a crawl. With some mid-summer travelling and wedding planning thrown on top, I’m surprised to be writing this post a day earlier than the deadline.
Compared to the first two projects, I feel like my brainstorming and planning process has improved considerably. The scope of this concept was just the right size to meet the requirements without getting bogged down by implementation, and I was able to incorporate some additional features like a dropdown search bar after-the-fact without breaking anything beyond recognition.
I also stepped up my Googling over the past two weeks considerably, which paid off considerably when working on this project. While I still needed to refer back to prior readings during the first two projects, I feel like the amount of information we were working with was still manageable enough that additional research could be considered supplementary. With Rails, I would estimate that half of my working hours were spent searching and reading docs, StackOverflow, and blog posts in order to parse out the concepts and features I was trying to incorporate. It’s still strange to think that this is a normal part of the development cycle, though there is a sense of satisfaction that comes with choosing the best possible solution you can find that fits within the framework of what you’ve learned rather than just incorporating the first thing that pops up on your screen.
Looking ahead to Javascript, I’ll be very curious to revisit the language almost a year after first encountering it in the Bootcamp Prep program. There are already several ideas I have for incorporating more dynamic action into this project, and I’ll be curious to see how much of the core functionality I maintain when I revisit it with a new set of tools.