Having just completed the second portfolio project, I’m doing some rethinking in terms of my approach to the curriculum going forward. The pace was notched up significantly once we hit ORM/Sinatra, and by the beginning of this project cycle I was more than a little worried about the workload that I had let pile up. Thankfully, building with Sinatra turned out to be a much smoother process than I was expecting, so I was able to get myself back on track. Looking ahead though to the next several months, I’m definitely going to place much more emphasis on pushing through material early in the week so that I can schedule out additional time as needed later on.
I’ll leave some reflections on my project below, but first I just wanted to mention something my cohort lead gave me to think about when I was running behind schedule on the Sinatra curriculum. She told me a story (apologies if I get some of the details wrong Nancy!) about a math teacher her son had who was getting queries over and over from a student to explain in detail the mechanics of the principles they were learning. Finally, the teacher turned to the student and said, “I need you you to have some faith and believe that these things that I’m telling you work.” His point was that when you’re learning, the act of using and experimenting with a tool can give you insight into how it functions.
As someone who has a tendency to look under the hood in order to learn why something works the way it does, I have to constantly remind myself of this sentiment. The pace of the Flatiron program is blisteringly fast, and I can get bogged down when I don’t fully understand a Readme the first time through. However, the process of building these portfolio projects has helped me tie together the concepts I’ve struggled with most just by virtue of playing with them and seeing what does or doesn’t work. We’re covering a lot of material in five short months on the full-time track, and sometimes when I hit a wall with the material it can be incredibly demoralizing, but when that happens I’m finding that the best way to move forward is to remind myself that it’ll all come together if I push through and take a leap of faith.
Other thoughts:
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Googling methods is eye-opening, every time I find out about another feature of programs like ActiveRecord that make me want to go back and refactor all of my project code
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Stick to RESTful routes; otherwise things get confusing REALLY fast! That said, my cohort lead showed me an interesting work-around for implementing different inputs on the same route using a conditional statement in order to extend my app’s functionality. Sounds like it’s not officially kosher (more in Rails coming up) but it was a good reminder to take a step back when what you’re implementing is becoming too complex and try to tackle it from a different, simpler angle.
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When you’re stuck on a lab, don’t feel shy about the AAQ feature. My Sinatra project clarified so many elements that had me scratching my head while working on Fwitter because I was thinking about how to construct an object to fulfill a function rather than how to pass the parameters of a test. Most of the time the test error is the result of an issue with your grammer/syntax rather than with your logic, which is exactly the kind of thing you want a coach to clarify so that you’re not doubting your approach to solving a problem.