Week 4 — in Retrospect

The past week has been Week 3 of my learning experiment in which I attempt to teach myself web development, with the goal of being good enough to get a SWE internship next summer.

What’s gone well:

• Tracking: It’s been a slow week as far as progress is concerned. But I wouldn’t even know that if I weren’t tracking. I have a separate slot in the Google Sheet I use to track my time dedicated to recording time spent on this project. Helps keep it top of mind.

What’s gone poorly:

• Time: Old bugbear. Managing school and this has proven to be every bit the challenge I’d expected — and more.
• “Rabbit holes”: I spent hours this past week trying to figure out how to incorporate an existing repo as a functioning, non-independent subdirectory of another existing repo. Maddening stuff. And it turns out it wasn’t even necessary. I think (this is a hunch) that, in these initial stages, I should embrace quick-and-dirty solutions if it means avoiding the bottlenecks caused by overoptimizing. But I needed some time away from the problem to even view it in that light.

What I’ve built:

See last week’s post.

Main addition is uniqueness validation for the Phonebook app:

Phonebook now validates that name input is unique

Repos with all my work for this course so far:

• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/phonebook3
• https://github.com/anirudhkannan9/fso_test

Heroku websites (interactive):

• Phonebook: https://phonebook3-backend.herokuapp.com/
• Notes: https://safe-meadow-23610.herokuapp.com/

Going forward:

• Continue the good stuff: see previous posts for what’s worked well.
• Time: Find a way to regularize sleep schedule so that I can wake up early enough to devote consistent time to this.