FINALLY ON TO JAVA (SCRIPT) THAT IS

My Journey with the Flatiron School has not been traditional at all. I started as a full-time student back in May of 2020 which was supposed to take 5 months. But the extreme learning curve I endured has set me back a lot. I can honestly say that I have learned so much and that because of this extra time I am a much better developer and when it’s time to go into the job market I will be ready.

Going through my Rails with JavaScript Portfolio Project, I think I should reflect on what it was like to switch from Ruby to Javascript frontends. My Rails project had over 10 views, so going from that to a one-page application was very interesting especially in the planning process. I built an activity creator and randomizer. I built my application “Smart-Activity” so that a user can have 3 activities randomized for them so that it could improve their overall health. I say this application improves health because there is an activity from 3 different categories, psychological, physical, and spiritual. My first thought about JavaScript was it was similar in structure to ruby but so many things were a lot different especially the syntax. Because I enjoyed Ruby on Rails so much I was so excited to learn a front end language to pair with Ruby. Quickly I realized that Javascript and DOM manipulation was going to be a big learning curve especially in terms of syntax. I was shocked at the lack of errors on certain things and the lack of descriptiveness when it came to errors.

I would say as someone who had to experience this learning curve, my advice to someone looking to get started with JS after learning Ruby is to take it very slow and make sure they that are understanding the syntactic differences and why things still work in Java script even though it may not be what the developer meant for. Overall I would say the transition was a bit rough but I made it!