The Power of Optimism
Hello! Back again here with me and my blog! It’s been two weeks since I’ve written my first blog. Today I wanted to share my journey in Generasi Gigih in the Front End Engineering Path. It’s already been 4 weeks I’m into the intermediate phase of Generasi Gigih where we are trained from Monday to Friday from the technical classes and also English classes with Cakap, an English online course provider.
It has been such a rollercoaster ride now since I’m actually juggling a lot of responsibilities while enrolling in Generasi Gigih. However, I’m really happy that I can pull it off and finish my daily goals everyday like attending all the classes and finishing all the homework in Generasi Gigih, and also other daily goals such as finishing up my undergraduate thesis and also doing my internship work. Good news is that I’m finally doing my undergraduate thesis seminar this week! Really happy that I can finally finish it.
Through out my journey in Generasi Gigih, I’ve been exposed to many React concepts and techniques that I can apply to my Front End App. From the beginning of week 3, I really felt the slap in my face because it was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be from the first two weeks! Starting from the third, I was introduced to networking concepts that I thought would be uncomplicated because in class we were just practicing on the Giphy Web API which didn’t need a lot of authorization protocols as we were just putting the API Key on the request parameters. However, starting from the third week’s homework, we were assigned to connect our app to the Spotify Web API ! To be honest, this was a very challenging task for me because the authorization flow was complicated and new to me as I’ve never implemented this kind of authorization before. Therefore, I had to learn from the documentations that were provided by Spotify and had a lot of help from my kind friends! After hours and hours of putting the work and debugging, this is my result so far:
By the end of this fourth week I am able to create a Spotify Front-End App that can:
- Login to my Spotify account and redirect to the create playlists page
- Search any tracks from Spotify
- Select any tracks from Spotify that I like
- Create new playlists and insert the selected tracks!
I feel like the 5–6 hours that I’ve put to finish each homework was worth it. Well, even though there are still a few bugs in my app but I’ve come a long way to understand the concepts in Front End Engineering, because what matters is not the speed but its always little progress every day right?
In the fourth week of Generasi Gigih, the committee announced the leaderboard of all 282 participants of Generasi Gigih. To provide more context, in the intermediate phase students are scored based on the points they received. The points are based on different things such as activeness in class, attending the class, and finishing homework. So as I was looking through the leaderboard, I was really happy to see my ID in one of the top 30 performers! I feel that my efforts to perform well in this course was worth it. I’m also really glad that my name was put on the Recognition Wall of Generasi Gigih!
Being active in class wasn’t that easy for me as what people might think because the temptation to not actively participate is actually really big as everything is done remotely. However, I put my best effort to be active as I can by turning my cam on and participate in the discussions when I can! Even though my knowledge is limited, I try my best to also help out my friends during the hands on session and answer questions from the mentors during class. However, I think that there are a few things that I could improve on such as being more focused in class as sometimes I could zone out because the concepts are difficult to comprehend😄.
If I was told to ask anything to my friends who made it to the top of the board, I would ask “How do you keep your enthusiasm when things don’t go as planned?”. I would ask this question because I’ve moments before where I’m stuck in fixing my code and no matter what I do, it just wouldn’t work and there are moments where I would want to give up. From what I learned from them is that they have a lot of passion in the subject from tinkering with the technologies themselves. In my class there is Gilbert and Aufa who is the most active students who know a lot about Front End Engineering. From my observation, they have a lot of exploring on Front End Engineering on their own and always try to answer other students questions on Discord whenever someone is stuck. I think I should also explore more on my own about Front End Engineering and also be more active in helping out Generasi Gigih community.
For everyone else who are striving in Generasi Gigih, I just want to say to not be hard on yourself when you fail or you get stuck on your homework! Just chill and sit back for a while because sometimes solutions can come out by itself when your brain is clear without any pressures! Also don’t be afraid to ask your classmates or to even direct message the mentors because they will definitely love to share their knowledge😊.
