The Life & Times: My GA Software Engineering Immersive Experience

WOW!, This is the three letter word i find myself uttering the most through this journey to becoming a Full-Stack Engineer. My first inclination, is to give praise and respect to all the people that came before me, and during my time as well in the current Immersive given the current state of the world, Especially America. I was challenged with the task of creating an React.js App which implemented API calls to retrieve information and render to the window for the users pleasure, for this task the cohort was given noe calendar week to achieve this goal collectively.

PROJECT CONCEPT:

My Application is called fetchGOAL, It's an app for fanatic futbol(Football) fans. Users can see a list of all the current matches available, and the country they are taken place in. Also users can see information regarding the team in terms of current coaches, players on roster, formation, as well as the current olds for the match.

PROJECT PLANNING:

By far my weakest point!. I was told by one of my Instructors to always under promise and over deliver, However coming from sales my mind was trained totally wrong. I had grand ideas with so little knowledge base. I designed my App with the ability to fetch and render information from an API that i found on Rapidapi.com I was very intrigued by API's in general so i figured this would be a fun way to include one of my favorite sports futbol! (American Soccer). Using the API and accessing it via my private API which was supplied by the creators was no easy task at all, However I gained a great deal on knowledge on fetching information from a company's server and rendering it for a user, as many people have used internet search engines on a daily basis, I'm almost certain a great deal have no idea how that information is rendered back to them in many cases in less than 1 second. My App looked to become a player in this field.

DON'T FREAK OUT!:

Many times along the way the found myself freaking out to ten power, doubting my abilities, and doubting my learning capacity!, However my instructors where there for me EVERY STEP OF THE WAY! (even though they didn't hold my hand and gave me a great sense of independence, and the golden skill every Engineer must possess, The ability to do research and figure out the problem yourself before asking for help!.(Google is your friend). This is one of my top experiences so far from the Immersive.

TRUSTING THE PROCESS!:

Learning to program is an arduous, and can be a very intense and stressful task. However the concepts are my sticking point (the why? particle). I have been learning to submit to the great instructors at General Assembly, and continue to practice the process of coding, while gaining the understanding along the way. Handling more complex computing tasks, takes much more planning and project research then I first anticipated. Using figma I created my Wireframes, I was introduced to trello (to which I did not utilize to my fullest potential, A mistake I plan to not make again!)

PROJECT REFLECTION:

After many hours looking up concepts and Googling, I found myself getting the understanding of API fetch calls, and the concepts behind them. My entire goal in taking this Immersive was to focus on the Back-End Tech as in my mind this is the direction I would like to pursue, However with that being said I've realized that for my ambitions to take place, I must have a full understanding and much for respect for the UI/UX Front-End side of programing respectively.