We actually made it to the “end”. It is utterly crazy to imagine that our journey with Flatiron is nearing completion. It’s been one heck of a ride, a long and difficult road to be sure. We began our 5-month trek into the bowels of web development just midway through summer of this year. The world found itself in the midst of a global pandemic, the likes of which we haven’t seen in a century. What a time for a career change huh?
The final hurdle was laid out in front of us a couple weeks back now. Our project was to build an application utilizing the React framework coupled with Redux. I opted for doing my best at making a D&DBeyond clone. The last five months have been filled with many long nights and a lot of frustration, but nothing like this. To say I bit off more than I could chew is a massive understatement, and while I’m proud of what I accomplished, it’s nowhere near complete.
It’s hard to believe that we’re at the end of module 4 already. About a month ago we began our journey into Javascript and to say it was a frustrating experience would be an understatement. After 3 months of Ruby, moving onto another language was difficult, though not as difficult as I had anticipated. Fortunately, we had an established foundation and certain things carried over very easily. Terminology and “how-to” do things were similar enough -functions execute blocks of code, arrays contain multiple elements and are iterable, and objects/hashes contain key: value pairs.
Wow.
Here we are at yet another major milestone of the Flatiron program. The end of this week marks the completion of our second project. This week we were utilizing Sinatra and ActiveRecord to create a program, that for the first time, was able to persist data. As might be recalled from my previous post, my CLI project took FOREVER to load. It was making a ton of API requests every time the program ran. All that data had to be gathered each time the program ran and lost each time it was terminated. Gone are those days! Thanks to ActiveRecord we are now able to store data between sessions that can be accessed again in the future. This is pretty common in our everyday live, but as a budding software engineer, is a huge deal.