For this learning module, we covered many things, such as development environment and coding styles. Personally, I think it might have been too much to cover over the weekends. I had many struggles to figure out what I am supposed to do throughout the module even though I followed the intsructions through and through. Another problem I came across the most was that I use Windows (Dell), and the teacher uses Mac to teach all of the lessons, which sometimes leaves me with lots of questions that can’t be answered through Slack channel. Maybe I am too afraid to ask the question because I don’t want to look stupid, but at the same time, I know these things are supposed to be easy and simple. I spent the weekends pulling my hair because none of the things seemed to work, and I was worried that I was going to go crazy over npm command lines. I often wondered ‘Why can’t we use something more modern and simple?’ My personal experience was difficult but at the end, I sort of figured out what I was doing wrong and things eventually worked.
I had to open all of this to do only one project. And I fount the experience too intricate. Before we got into all of this, I was very happy with using the JSFiddle because that’s all I needed to open and work on and get result on the same page. But this week’s module, required me to juggle all of the mentioned above at the same time, jumping from one to another, then to another, then to another, and so on. Sometimes, I was so lost in everything I was doing that my eyes started to hurt from staring at my screen for hours. I really tried my best to make it work and follow all the steps correctly, but my command line was full of errors and nothing was working properly. I was getting tired of it. I rewatched the teacher’s screencast several time until I hated hearing his voice, but still nothing worked and I ended up sad and confused. And that night, I had nightmares about getting errors everywhere and I seemed to fall apart. So, that sums up my experience of crying over problems that can be fixed with little bit of guide from a teacher (but we are expected to learn everything at home and ask ‘smart’ questions only).
It worked after all! It worked and the programs did what they are supposed to do, and they were just okay. The module took away my whole weekend, and I couldn’t do my assignments for other classes, so I was behind on everything else. Not only did I miss the assignment for this class, but I missed other two classes’ assignments. I was sad and disappointed in myself because everyone else in the class didn’t seem to have problems with it. I felt stupid and even considered dropping out of the class because the teacher said it should be “simple”. It really wasn’t for me. All of the lessons were taught in Macs that I had to look online for what’s the equivalent for Windows. It took a long time, the whole weekend to work everything in harmony. I prayed and wished for something simpler. I just hope I never have to use any of this in the future other than this class. Maybe it’s too early to judge. I might actually get used to the whole patern and start to like it, but so far, I find the process onerous.
I wished that we did the whole process in class that there is a direct access to the teacher and the TA. It definitly would’ve saved lot of time for me and surely other students. Though most of the ICS classes are flipped classes, which means the students learn at their own time and do practice problems in class. It is favored by lot of students, but I think some classes should have both methods. Sometimes they should have the lessons in class to make sure that everyone is on the same page. And, when we are on the same page, we can do the practice problems later. I do understand that it takes time to set up all these things in class, but for students like me, it is much needed guidence and support. When we were just learning JavaScript and using JSFiddle to do our problems, I was always with the class and I didn’t feel like a potato head. However, for this module, I had the most terrible experience that I came to conclusion of being unmatched for the class. But I figured it out with some friend’s help, and I know I could’ve saved all the misery if the module was covered over in class, in person.
Development environment is very important for software engineers just because it is the tool that we are creating things. If we are comfortable with the working environment, then we are a happy developers. The ESlint was the only part I actually enjoyed learning and installing because it helps me a lot with writing good and clean codes. It gives you warmings and a little notes to better your code. That part was fun and enlightening. Though I had a bad experience with this module and figured things out, I am hoping to get more comfortable with all the steps I have to go through, just in case if my future job requires me to be efficient with all of these.
Thanks for reading!