One Man App
Today marks my first day of Mod 4 at the Flatiron School. Last mod, Mod 3, focused mostly on DOM Manipulation, which it turns out I’ll possibly never use again. I had to build an app in Vanilla JavaScript with a rails back end, and I am glad to say I’m starting React today. My mod 3 project went similarly to my mod 2 project, especially because it was basically the same thing, just less reactive. I switched the base template to another calendar, and like the last one this calendar had zero functionality.
Last time I made an app it was with a partner, and it was a mess. Pushing up to master, rewriting the whole thing last second, and having poor communication, left our app to really be anything special besides the styling. For my new app I wanted to do it differently, and I rewrote it from scratch, however borrowing a few things like CSS tricks. By Thursday morning I had been right where I left off in the Mod 2 project, and that’s where I realized I had a lot of work to do in not so much time.
Miraculously, I worked from 7am on Thursday until 2 in the morning. I made decent progress, but by Friday morning, when it was due, I did not have a fully functioning calendar, but I did have a decent looking project. Thankfully one of the requirements was not to have a finished product, so I was off the hook, but I still felt bad about it. Like I had all this time, and I only got a little further than last time.
So the game plan starts here. Next time I make an app and it’s due in a week, I start on Monday or even the weekend before, and make sure I allocate enough time to getting it done. Also, I need to ask questions. I did not ask a question in the Slack channel until the day it was due. If I had started on Monday, I would have encountered that problem on Tuesday, and I would have had an answer by Wednesday, but instead I got caught up on my back end not saving the events. A possible solution to this might be that the user I linked the events to didn’t exist. If only I knew that on Thursday I would have been that much closer to done on Friday.
When it comes to the calendar I’ve made 3x now that I call J-Cal, I really want it to be something that people can actually use. Like, if I’m at a bar and I’m like, “Hey, you should download J-Cal. It’s only the coolest way to schedule your events! J-Cal: A Calendar for the People,” I can be the coolest guy at the bar, no discussions needed to be had about it here. There are templates you can use to have your calendar looking like the best Apple Calendar, but these templates are really complicated and make it fairly impossible to make it your own. That’s why I used the simplest template I could find.. I did not add functionality for the click of a day in the calendar but things like this are an easier fix than you would think. A lot of my time was spent trying to get the fetch call to return the the payload, or for the time to be returned in a simpler format, which should both be easy fixes.
Now I heavily contemplated to continuously work on J-Cal3 in Vanilla JavaScript this last weekend, but I’m starting React today, so it doesn’t really matter. I’ll probably never use Vanilla JS again.
