I just spend the last 7 days all day every day building my first full stack app with my own node server and mongoDB data base running in the background to persist data. I built, what I consider the Product Hunt for ideas! You can check our Idea Hunt here. Here is a screenshot:
Here are some of my key takeaways from last week!
Javascript has its weird parts but its also incredibly powerful
There seem to be a lot of things that devs find weird about Javascript. Wont go much into detail but you can read the article I linked if interested. I personally think Javascript is incredibly powerful. Its the only language (as far as I know) that works on the client side (Javascript/Angular), on the server side (Node through Express), and Database (MongoDB through Mongoose). This is also what is known as the MEAN stack (Mongo-Express-Angular-Node).
Developer culture is incredibly collaborative
This project, as one might imagine, can be all time consuming, and there really isn't an end to product development. Plus the minimal requirements from General Assembly were quite the opposite of minimal. However, what stood out to me was how much people were willing to go out of their way to help each other to debug, to unblock, and to brainstorm. Based on what I have seen on the helpfulness of the internet (there are libraries for EVERYTHING!) and the open source nature of the web, this doesn't seem like an anomaly. I love it!
Much better appreciation for why certain "simple" things take forever to build such as auth and why certain things like responsiveness are actually quite easy to do
I now have so much respect and understanding of why somethings such as building out validation for a login screen might take days or the various complications when thinking about a simple one to many relationship. I get it because I had to do it. I can appreciate a solid validation scheme even though most users wont blink an eye. On the other side, I also understand how EASY it is to make a site responsive. Next time I hear that its going to take a month to make a site responsive, I am going to call bullshit on it! Yes, I understand it has to be tested on every device, browser, etc, but Bootstrap has taken care of most of those things!
Off to Ruby on Rails next!