Stretch For Success and to Learn More…a flatiron project approach

I went into all of the flatiron projects with a dilemma. Look at the requirements and try and build something that met those requirements and was aligned around the concepts that I felt comfortable with or come up with something that I wanted to actually use and try to build it even if I wasn’t sure, I could make it work. In all the projects I chose the latter and I can say with confidence that it was the right choice. This was never more evident than in the last react redux project.

I went into the last project with what I felt was a tenuous grasp on the basic concepts and a less than passing understanding of some of the key concepts, like the practical differences between class components and functional components, how to actually apply asynchronous code outside of the basic fetch examples, how to appropriately use lifecycle methods, where to put reusable actions, what is a flexbox and the biggest one of all “how the heck does react router actually work in a larger application with multiple components on the screen at the same time and what are the mysteries of history, match and location. Okay I didn’t actually even know those last three existed when I started.

I decided to build a fitness contest tracking application based on a fitness contest that me and several co-workers do every year at work. This required several models with complex relationships, very customized serializers, calculations and a UI that required me to push the limits of what I understood in react/redux. It definitely ended up being much harder than I had planned and with my limited amount of time to code as self-led student it took me roughly 36 days to build.

Building the application required me to have a much more detailed and broader understanding of all the things we covered in the course as well as several concepts that weren’t even covered in the course. This ended up paying huge dividends in the code review which was fairly intensive. I passed the code review in the first session which apparently is not the norm.

If I hadn’t stretched myself with the additional work to complete this real-life scenario based and usable application, I would have been lost through much of the code review and would have most likely had to utilize multiple sessions to complete it. All of that additional work allowed me to actually understand the code on a much deeper level than just trying to meet the requirements would have and after all learning not just passing is the goal right.