For my final project in the Learn.co, we were required to create a web app made with an AngularJS front end and an Rails backend. This has been the toughest assessment project I’ve had to do yet and required the most outside research and learning. In previous posts, I usually go over important or difficult code that had to be wrestled with to get to work. This project had me wrestling from start to finish and rather than review specific code in this post, I’ll go over a couple general lessons on how to approach obstacles.
It’s Okay to Not Know
Throughout this project I found myself lost and not knowing what the next step was or how to do it. The rails backend wasn’t so bad since I feel more at home in ruby and rails, but the javascript and angular front end was new territory for me. That portion of the Learn curriculum wasn’t structured like the rest of the program in that not very many labs tied in the many different concepts together.
When I got stuck on things like overall design patterns and how different services, controllers, and directives should interact with each other. I felt lost and didn’t know how to proceed. The biggest help for me was being fortunate enough to take breaks and being able to step away from the code and focus on other things. It’s a great feeling when a solution or new approach suddenly pops into your head when you are not coding. You want to race back to the computer to try it out.
Try It Out
The biggest obstacle in this project was one that I created myself. Doubt. I spent many hours shooting down my own ideas, thinking a more perfect and elegant solution would eventually show itself. Meanwhile, I hadn’t written a single line of code toward solving the problem. Many times, you just have to take swing, even if you are not sure if it will work. Trial and error is a huge of part of learning how to code.
Once I started trying things and observing how it worked and where it was failing, I felt like I was starting to understand more of what I needed to do get it working. Hacking away at a problem and finally arriving at a solution is such a great feeling, and once I got there I realized that the problem wasn’t insurmountable. It just requires you to think of a possible solution and try things out. Your problem solving and investigating skills will take over and you’ll slowly but surely make progress. That is all part of a normal learning process.