So here we are, the final project of my Flatiron School journey! I know I had said in my last blog post that the last mod was the most difficult, however this final mod definitely takes the cake. So here’s a little update on my personal life before I go into what made this project difficult. Since my last blog post I have moved into a new apartment with my family, which is stressful as you can imagine, but even more so during a pandemic. Life has been moving extra fast and I’ve found myself overwhelmed and super busy with juggling a full-time job, being a father of 2 boys, spending quality time with my wife and finishing up this coding bootcamp. These past couple of months have been exhausting and I’ve found myself struggling to finish up this project. From work being busier than normal, to COVID restrictions slightly easing up and having quality time with family, I found it hard to focus. I would get on the computer late at night and find myself falling asleep from being so exhausted, both physically and mentally. What helped me get over this was the fact that I started to really find myself wanting out from my full-time job as a Physical Therapist Assistant. Especially now with COVID cases rising again with this new Delta variant, I did not want to continue putting my kids and family at risk.
There were several technical things that I struggled with working through this project. My final project is sort of a Facebook marketplace/Craigslist type of webapp. I wanted to build something that allowed a user to sell or trade their products and comment on products.
One of the things I had trouble with and which I will continue to learn with each project I build from here on is CSS. I had a hard time trying to get my elements to scroll only to realize that I had set my background image to position: fixed which ended up being the problem. Then I had trouble with the background image not covering the entire webpage which I was able to get fixed with help from a Flatiron alum friend of mine with min-height: 100vh.
Another thing that I had a lot of trouble with was actually creating products and comments. I had forgotten to make use of rails console, that when I ended up using it I was able to create them pretty quickly.
Then came the actual rendering of products and comments on the page, that is probably what took a bulk of my time. After a lot of tinkering between the rails console and several iterations of mapping through both the product and comments arrays, I was able to get both to render on the page.
This is definitely an MVP for this project, however I plan on working on this project after graduation and making it a lot more presentable and incorporate more things like users, card components that link to a product show page and work more on the CSS styling of the page. I also plan on working on the projects I have posted in my resume to make them more eye catching for potential employers.
I have already actually applied for several apprenticeship positions and even made it to a second round phone screen with one company. However, I did not study and practice enough data structures and algorithms and ended up not being as prepared as I would have liked to be. I will push myself to practice more and more each day so that I can get better at those types of problems and land a job in the near future.
So here I am now, finally finishing this project and working towards practicing and learning more and more each day so that I can finally reach my dream of becoming a Software Engineer! Here’s to passing this final assessment and finally graduating!!