The week
The second week of our final project is over, we deployed it to Heroku, and we are now graduated! It has been a very productive week and we managed to overcome the challenges we faced last week. On Friday afternoon we presented our projects to family and friends. It was a very exciting and emotive moment to see all my colleagues showing the work they have been developing for the las two weeks. I’m very proud of all of them and really thankful for having had the opportunity of sharing these four months with such an amazing group of people. Also, I feel really lucky and thankful for our coach, Mary Rose Cook, from which I have learnt lots of best practices as a software developer, and the learning process that will help me develop my career in the future.
Studying at Makers Academy has been the best educational and personal experience in my life.
What I learnt
I learnt to overcome challenges, no matter how hard they seem to be. With effort and good teamwork, anything can be done. This week we even exceed our expectations! After spending the weekend and evenings studying React we had the most productive week ever. We worked hard and enjoyed the journey. Every member of the team found their strengths and together we developed CSS Playground, a tool that allows users to design web pages without the need of writing any code.
CSS Playground has a very user-friendly interface built with React, and outputs HTML and CSS code on the right side of the screen, so the user can see the code for the design they are creating in real time. When they are happy with the result, the user can click a button and download the code to their local machines. Cool!
Struggles
Our main struggle this week was testing our code. Understanding how React works took most of our time last week, and we wanted to be more productive and develop all our features by Tuesday night. Learning how to test React was hard but we managed to fulfil all the requirements we set at the start of the project, and we even exceeded them, improving our initial idea significantly. By the end of the week we had a very good test coverage and a fully working tool that was deployed to Heroku!
Makers Academy has been a fantastic experience. If you’re thinking about learning to code I totally recommend it! ❤️ 💻