Flatiron Phase 5
Phase 5 was a very strange phase when compared to the others. Every other phase consisted of learning a new language or framework for three weeks that we would then incorporate into a project during the last week of that phase. Phase 5 basically told us to create an application with a rails backend and react frontend…okay, have fun!
My confidence going into this project was very little. I felt like I was being thrown into the final project and couldn’t remember anything or how to start. One thing I did very differently from all of my other projects was planning. I had a solid plan at the beginning of my project creation that allowed me to lay out all of the resources and components I would need to complete the vision I had for this project.
Lets fast forward past the creation of the front end, back end and all of the components and controllers that accompany them. I started by enabling a user to sign up and login to my application. This part was less difficult than it was in phase 4. I had a much better understanding of how authentication worked and what code was necessary to store a username and secure password on the backend that would allow users to login and access a session.
The biggest road block I had while making this project was accessing data from an external API and then persisting it to the back end. I was able to fetch from the API just fine. However, saving the data that was received from the API was a bit of a struggle. In the end, I made it much harder on myself than it needed to be. After creating a controller, model and serializer for the songs, I found out that saving the songs to the users playlist was the same as a user creating a playlist. The main difference was capturing the data that already existed from the API and creating a “copy” of it, instead of capturing data from the inputs the user fills out that doesn’t exist anywhere before hand.
I was very nervous for my phase 5 project. After working through it and seeing everything come together as smoothly as it did. I realized that I knew a lot more than I have been giving myself credit for. I remembered a lot of the react fundamentals that I felt I had forgotten and a lot of the ruby we previously learned and that I struggled to understand, was much easier to implement this time around. All in all, phase 5 was absolutely a confidence booster and success!