My console just kept running thousands of lines of code. What is going? Is this working? I’ve never created a giant database. It felt like a thunderstorm that wouldn’t stop and all I could do is wait it out.
And then it abruptly stopped. I peered at it like a kid peeking out a window.
I realized I successfully seeded my multi-table, multi-relationship database on my first from-scratch project ever!
Nothing but blue skies after two days of rain. I realized I successfully seeded my multi-table, multi-relationship database on my first from-scratch project ever! Front end work, here I come!
But first, let me bore you with how hard I worked to get this far.
- I’ve created UX documents on the side because the UX designer in me couldn’t help it: Created a Customer Journey Map and Wireframes.
- I’ve created many Developer documents for my App: Data Model diagram, MVP’s key features, additional features for my second sprint.
- I created a file specifically named “data-validation.py” to test and I play with my original JSON files directly. I found the longest length of every data column in my self-built database through iterating through the original JSON files with Python. (anyone have a more standard name for my “playing with data file”?)
- I’m self-studying React as I’m pushing myself to build client-side rendering (as I’m ahead of a lot of my cohort-mates that are still working on approving their data models and will be building their front end with server-side rendering)
- I’m using a college student’s bareboned API as my primary data. The original main JSON output (of a 2 output API) had many bugs (imagine how long it took me to figure out the output had two different kinds of apostrophes, then just imagine all the other random bugs a single college kid can import because they never used it to build, then imagine another young developer trying to use it and all the bugs needed to debug).
- I had to work out how to parse certain strings and nested arrays/dictionaries (JS/Python, what language do I prefer anymore?)
- I’ve never had to be so organized in my code. This is my first project and the most code I’ve ever wrote on one thing! Code organization is always a growth point. I don’t know how many times I renamed classes, attributes, etc and rewrote comments to be clean, clear, and concise. I want a future recruiter, technical or not, to be able to look at my files and say “I can understand everything she did!”
- I also created a Trello board to keep myself organized through all this. This is new to me too. As a decade long teacher, much of my organization was focused on transparency (physical, digital) to students (math, yearbook). So focusing my organization on myself only has actually been enjoyable.
On top of a daily lecture and a meeting with my career advisor, I threw in about 20 hours Monday and Tuesday just to get to this point. But I’m here! I did get about a 10 hour headstart last week. My goals are just to always bring my A game. Locked down in a pandemic in a new city hundreds of miles from the nearest friend helps. Also, Bixby my cat, and my husband who would build night and day if I wasn’t around.
RachelElysia 