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This project was our second project of Mod 1 and involved us recreating an app from a comp and adding functionality with vanilla JavaScript. We worked with one other student for this project. The goal of this application was to allow a user to create a task and set an amount of time that they would work on that task. The user selected a category, gave their task a description, and set an amount of time. The user could then start the timer and log the activity when the timer ends.
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IdeaBox was our third project of Mod 1 and we worked in groups of three. The goal was to create an web app where a user can add cards that contain a title and a body. The cards are meant for the user to write notes or ideas, and then to be able to favorite and delete the individual cards. We had to implement local storage as well as classes and objects.
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Whats Cookin' was the second project of Mod 2 and was a partner project. The goal of this project was to utitlize ES6 classes that communicate with each other to create the core of the app's functionality. We also implemented TDD and did our best to follow the single responsibility principle.
When I work in a team, I tend to fall more on the leadership side of the team dynamic. In a group of just two, there is less of the 'leader and follower' dynamic; which I enjoyed in this project. I would not say I am bossy, but I tend to be decent at organizing my thoughts and therefore don't mind taking on leadership roles. For this particular project, I think my partner and I split the responsibility and leadership very well.
When working on a team, I try to work on my patience and communication skills. One pitfall I find myself in sometimes is that I like to just keep working when I have an idea on how to implement something. I have to remind myself that this is a group project and we all need to be on the same page. For this project, a large chunk of our work time ended up being remote due to bad weather, so this presented some new challenges to the team dynamic. We each had to take extra ownership of our communication and had to be patient with the remote workflow that we are still getting used to.
When I can't work out the solution to a certain coding problem, the first thing I do is take out my notebook to a fresh page. I have found that writing out my problem in plain English is helpful for me to organize my tasks and get myself back on track. If I am still stuck after doing this, I will consult the internet or the people around me if I am working on campus. Finally, my mentor and students further along in the program have been extremely helpful in finding solutions to my techincal issues. Reaching out to them is usually my last resort, but I am very glad I have those resources and that Turing cultivates this atmosphere of support.
- For the group project, one specific techincal challenge we ran into was getting our data from local storage back into an instance of our class. We were storing objects within our local storage, but then found out we were unable to run any of our object methods on these pieces of data because once they are pulled from local storage, they no longer are recognized as instances of our class. We struggled through this for most of the last work day, and reached out to mentors and our project manager for guidance. I am happy that we worked so hard on it and were able to get a better grasp on the concept. Although we did not have time to implement it perfectly and our project still has some bugs, I am proud of what we accomplished.
One personal takeaway from this project is that I realized along the way how easy it is to get sucked into working exclusively on the project and ignoring my other responsibilities. I learned that I needed to set more time aside to review instructional lessons, complete practice exercises, or do other homework. Luckily, I did have this realization pretty early on in the project and was able to better schedule my time for the remaining time.
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(group project): Learning the remote work-flow was a big takeaway for this project. Since we were more or less forced to work from our own homes due to weather, our team had to learn to communciate and work when we can't be in the same room. Personally, I was happy for the experience and learned how working remotely can be frustrating at times, but ultimately is a very important skill to learn. The whole experience certainly improved my communication abilties and my confidence in getting things done even when the team is not working in the same space.
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(Whats Cookin'): This project gave me more confidence in my ability to use classes and their methods. I believe the use of array prototype methods in combination with a continued growth in my understanding of ES6 classes made this a successful project for me. Although there were some personal issues with this project that led to time-line issues (my partner had a family emergency during the first week of the project and missed most of the week), we were able to over come this and reach our MVP.
I learned a lot about DOM manipulation in JavaScript and how to access/target specific element through this project. Although we learned event delegation a little too late to use it in our project (in fear that we would break everything and not have time to fix it before the deadline), my partner and I did spend a lot of time talking about how we could have used it to optimize our functionality and clean up our JavaScript.
- (group project): Learning local storage the week the project was due was definitely a challenge. Our lesson on this was very helpful, but we struggled through it when attempting to implement it into our IdeaBox project. The big takeway for me on this subject is that the data you pull from local storage is not automatically in the same format as when you pushed it. Learning JSON and how to manipulate that data between JavaScript and the browser was a big challenge but an important one to tackle.
-(Whats Cookin'): This was the first project where I consistently reached for ES6 syntax before anything else, and this was a challenege but also helpful. Utilizing ES6 as often as possible cemented a lot of the concepts that we have been working on. Specifically, we used the forEach() method, filter(), and ES6 classes a lot.
I am excited to use the new JS concepts we have been learning and to implement them in future work. I also plan to continue to narrow down my day-to-day schedule to best use my time. Continuing to practice/improve my CSS skills is another goal of mine.
-(group project): On the next project, I want to continue to focus on using a project board to better organize my workflow. I also want to get better at making atomic commits and correctly utitlizing PR's. On the technical side, I want to continue to learn how to use local storage correctly as well as object classes to make DRYer and more dynamic code.
-(Whats Cookin'): I would like to work on my styling as my partner handled most of the CSS for this project. I also need to work on DRY-ing up certain functions and avoiding redundancy.