Finally moving on…

This has easily been the most difficult project I’ve ever had to build. I thought Ruby/Rails was complicated but sheesh, JavaScript’s reputation has rang true since day 1.

It has taken me a few months to finally come to the end of the Vanilla JS of the curriculum. There were lots of concepts that took me a long time grasp, even a few that can easily stump me to this day. At the end of the day, I’ve found that the best teacher is experience/building and I feel much more comfortable with this language today than I did last week or whenever I started this unit.

The guidelines for this assignment were to create a vanilla JS frontend project that would use an API from Rails as the backend, something we’d be more comfortable with. The backend part turned out to be pretty straightforward once you get accustomed to the part where you don’t need to generate views any longer; this would be a single page application and the JavaScript would handle all of the page animations and mutations.

My index page only included the first “user name” form, some containers for the elements that will soon occupy the page and a dark mode toggle.

One of the first most interesting things I had to learn was how to dynamically generate a form. After a little ‘google-ing’ on how to do it, I found a blog discussing jQuery that showed the above pictured method of creating a form. This was one of the 1st major breakthrough moments toward getting this project complete.

For me, another key moment was deciding instead of submitting a search form for the Restaurants, I would have the restaurants appear automatically on the ‘keyup’ whenever a user starts to type either its name, cuisine or location. This seemed like a semi-advanced feature that would make my project look good in the end.

In the end, I’d say I learned a lot doing this project. I had some really high moments and some really low ones, but I’m glad to say with each project completion I start to feel more and more like a “real developer”.

So hopefully once I finish up the React unit more of the imposter syndrome goes away!