Final Project Time…
12 weeks of intense skills based learning. Building the skills needed to create full stack applications using various technologies, methodologies and techniques, and it all comes down to this. One week to bring all the skills together and build my pièce de résistance. At this point a good nights sleep is a distant memory and I am pushing forward with sheer force of will. My project idea, a community application called Pedal Board where users can track their favourite guitarist’s effects pedal choices. I chose this because as a keen guitarist I often find myself searching for this information when I try to emulate their sound.
As part of the minimum viable product we are challenged to use a technology we had not learned about during our time in the course. I chose to build the entire back end using a new language and framework, Django with python. At the start of this process, reading documentation was daunting and overwhelming to say the least but due to my exposure to the wonderful and varied world of technology docs I am now able to work through them with confidence.
Another challenging aspect of the build is that I am utilising a many to many relationship between the models. Although we have worked through examples in class this is the first time I have designed the models and connected them up myself. This has led to some design choices I hadn’t considered. As a learning experience it has been fantastic. Pushing through on my own, learning the pitfalls by hitting all of them will make me more aware in the future.
At this point in project week I am half way through. I have managed to get the back end working and connected to the react front end. The many to many relationship is up and running however how to manage this on the front end has posed some problems so far however I have learned to break problems up and focus on small victories. This approach has brought me step by step towards my goal. I have a few days left to complete the application and I am excited to learn more while doing.
