Overall
We made it. One project down (pending review and assessment of course.) As challenging as it was to not have the Learn prompts and tests to guide me through the process, I’m thankful to have been tasked with creating a CLI. I decided to share a little about my experience with creating it, and what’s different on this side of it.
The Good
By being challenged more than normal, I found out that I knew more than I thought I did. This is the biggest takeaway, and largest reason why turning in the project feels like a relief. I increased my ability to google. Some people may laugh, but even only a month into this program (a month??) I often get stuck even with how to phrase what I’m looking for help with. Lastly, I learned how to ask for help. As I’ve gotten a better idea of what I do know, and learned how to google for some of the things I don’t, I know better now that leaning on other people is a big part of learning to code. Other people have different strengths than me and in turn may have a grasp of topics I’m still learning.
The Not-So-Good
The first thing that comes to mind is that the project took me longer than I would’ve liked. I had a grasp on my topic idea and what I wanted the application to do, but I underestimated how long it would take me to put ideas into practice. This second thing is ultimately a positive from the project, it just didn’t feel like it in the moment. I learned some areas I know less about and need to work on more. For the most part I was able to get my application to do what I wanted it to do, but there were times I needed to get creative with code I felt better about to make up for potentially easier/cleaner code I was left comfortable with. That’s a good segue into the last topic: I wonder what I could’ve done better. Obviously turning in this project is not the end-all-be-all for this CLI gem, but clicking submit does bring up questions of what else could I have made this application do had I made some different decisions along the way.
Conclusion
I hope this gives a complete view of the process working on a CLI data gem. It’s tough, it’s tiring, it’s challenging, it’s a learning process, it’s helpful, and it’s done(!)