Photo by Lewis Kang'ethe Ngugi on Unsplash
It Turns Out There Is Always More To Learn
How using GitHub helped me to accomplish an app Transformation
With my latest project, I started almost a month ago. When I started my project I had an idea of what I wanted to do and how everything worked well. I found an API that fit my wants, I created a base idea and followed it during a whole day of coding. By de end of the day, I was left with a feeling of not being able to do what I wanted to do.
Going Back To Go Forward
Once I had part of my project done I decided to talk to my mentor, the conversation went well but some things had to be improved and a major factor in that was that the API that I had chosen did not provide a lot of information or data to match the requirements of the assessment.
So now I have this thirty-five percent done project with an API that I could not use the way I was supposed to use, which would be completely fine, but I had to add a couple of factors to the equation. I have been undergoing some family problems at the moment and do not have much time in sum that I am undergoing a change of career in which the little time I had left is being consumed by learning new skills and technologies.
I had to think and think fast and then I remembered at the beginning of my boot camp classes about git and GitHub enabling the user to recover certain versions of their code so they could bug track or in my case downgrade to a less advanced version.
Learning New Skills by Learning New Skills
Okay, I had a plan of how to save part of my hard work, but now, I need to know how to use the tool that will help me accomplish that and when doing that GOOGLE is your best friend. I had millions of useful posts, blogs and content. Amazing right? NO! It was too much information, it almost felt like people were trying to show how much they knew about it. So, it was actually in the few minutes I had to browse my LinkedIn page that I found a post. Simple, informative and helpful.
Going Forward
Once I recognized what I needed and wanted to save from my previous version, with the help of this post and some Googleness, I was able to restart my project from a safe place. I started focusing more and more on updating and adding to the repository and was able to get ahead really quickly (remember that time is something that I do not have at the moment). After that, I put a plan together of how I would use my API integrating array methods, three different types of event listeners and also use my previous idea.
Going Back And Then Beyond
Even after that, I had to implement many changes and add so much stuff to my code. Every time I got lost I would go back to my Github, check my commits and see what needed or not to be changed. It just made me realize that I wrote something that worked or not, git add ., git commit and git push were being typed in my terminal almost automatically. This is a practice that I learned and I am really proud of it.
Now with my project finished, I am happy to tell that I haven't just learned DOM manipulation, server and new methods. I can say that I learned best practices to use in the real world, with a real team and in a real job!