Hello again, I recently completed my Mod 4 Project at the Flatiron school, and this project was a culmination of 10 months of struggles, victories, luck, and defeat. I endeavored into the sea of coding, and now the goal of becoming a full-stack Developer has begun to materialize all around me; I barely noticed. As I built the backend of my project, creating an API with Rails, I forgot the weeks it took to understand ‘Object-Orientation.’ I also forgot the two days months ago when I ‘rolled-back’ a migration and broke my project beyond repair. I forgot the hours working with ‘Squids,’ Ice-cream Cones, arrow functions, strong params, and serializers. I forgot about the first time I saw an idea in my head turn into a program that others could use. I forgot a lot.
I don’t have a terrible memory as some of you are probably thinking. I forgot because I was creating something. Detail by detail, the exciting, frustrating, satisfying, and rambling nature of making an application was all-consuming. The world outside my window fell away. Calls from family or friends were ignored. Lunches missed, and bags grew under my eyes. Once I finished and committed all my features, it dawned on me. I wasn’t a student, studying rules and conventions. I was a full-stack developer. I learned those rules, and they were ‘in my hand.’ Time to forget everything, and do it. I had to finish the app. This realization reminded me of a musical I studied in college; ‘Sunday in the Park with George’. The show is about a painter, also suffering for his art. He sings a song called, you guessed it, ‘Finishing the Hat.’ The song is about agony and joy in creating art.
Lyrical Excerpt
Mapping out a sky
What you feel like, planning a sky
What you feel when voices that come
Through the window
Go Until they distance and die
Until there’s nothing but sky
And how you’re always turning back too late
From the grass or the stick
Or the dog or the light …
Coming from the hat, studying the hat
Entering the world of the hat
Reaching through the world of the hat
Like a window
Back to this one from that
There’s a part of you always standing by
Mapping out the sky, finishing a hat
Starting on a hat, finishing a hat
Look, I made a hat
Where there never was a hat’*
You can substitute the word ‘hat’ for ‘app,’ and the song works. When you start building your canvas is blank. It can be difficult to not just ‘jump’ around as George warns. He is mapping out a world in his head and creating the pieces one of the most famous paintings in history.
What I take away from this connection is ‘applied passion.’ In creating my app, there seemed to be an ‘unlimited’ number of pieces to pull together. Every step I took, I would think about the client, the server, and the controllers. With every change, I had to go back and ‘re-render,’ fetch again, update the DOM again, submit another ‘POST,’ or ‘PATC H’ request. I lost myself in the app. I was overwhelmed, trying to pull it all together. So, I thought of George and how he narrowed his focus to once ‘piece’ at a time. The mapping was in George’s head, and he just painted the ‘hat,’ the ‘bonnet flapping,’ or the ‘dog.’ That’s the advice I offer, instead of creating the app, finish one piece.
For example, with my frontend, I ask myself the same three questions for every step.
1. What is the expected result?
2. What type of event triggers the result?
3. When should the event happen?
Keeping these questions in front of my mind allowed me to narrow my focus to implement a feature from idea to tested code.
Answers: 1. A new Instance of my Object should render to the DOM 2. Submit Event 3. When the user ‘clicks’ the form’s submit button
These questions guided me through my entire application. My blank canvas was now a complex and intricate Single Page Application that persisted. My features blended-in to my window beautifully, and anyone looking at it saw a virtual chore tracker for families. They didn’t a button or an event listener or a POST request to the server. That isn’t visible through the window.
Look I made an app, Where there never was an app.
Source: Sunday in the Park with George - music and lyrics by Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine.