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Final Thoughts

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Wow! Are we really at the end of the term? In a weird way, it feels like it has been a long, but short journey. I will admit that this class was a lot more difficult than I thought it would be. There were times when I felt pretty strong in the material we were learning and other times when I wanted to completely give up. I feel like I have a lot more respect for web developers and I think it would be a cool opportunity in the future to be a communications person working very closely with a developer.

I thought I would be extremely proud of the final product, but I ran into the strangest issue yesterday. Although I was updating code and running all the software, my local host would not make updates and it became extremely frustrating. I feel like I might have de-bugged the issues, but I don’t know because I can’t see it. I know that our updates were due yesterday, but I am hoping for peace of mind, I will be able to figure out what the issue is.

Anyways, at first I did not want to do any customizations that would challenge me, but now I am glad I picked ones like the map. I feel like this gave me a glimpse of what it could be like in the web development world. Sometimes there might be a client that visualizes something so complicated and the developer saying, “Oh yeah, we could definitely make this happen,” and then realizing that it wasn’t as easy as they thought it would be. I felt this way when I was brainstorming customizations and then realizing that it wasn’t as easy as following along to a resource online.

Overall, this class could come in handy one day.  I’m sure I won’t think about how frustrated I was in this class, but instead be able to empathize with the developer and agree that web development is no joke!

 

Final Reflection

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As our time together comes to an end and I begin to reflect upon this semester, I must say that although this course has been difficult, I would highly recommend it to any fellow student.

This class is not easy. It takes up more time than any other course I have taken at Georgetown thus far. It is confusing, frustrating, overwhelming at times, and intense.

But, at the same time I will leave this class with more knowledge than any other course I have taken over the past year. The skills I have learned are practical, rare within my professional community, and set me apart as an asset to the team.

I think my personal struggle is that I look at things as a big picture – in my professional work, I can determine what small steps need to be taken to achieve a larger goal and that has served me very well thus far. With coding, however, I am so focused on the end result I struggle to understand the small pieces that add up to the larger project. I think this is partially due to the fact that I don’t fully understand the smaller steps – I don’t fully understand how a website or app works to a point where I can say “I want my final product to be X, and must do A, B, and C to achieve that.”

Although this course has not taught me how to learn X, A, B, and C (I think that will take years) it has helped me realize that I am too focused on the big picture and need to take more time learning the smaller steps.

Reviewing everyone’s final projects during class last week helped me see that there were lots of small, yet important steps that could be taken to improve our sites. When I took on my final project, I was so focused on the final “update” or “addition” that I did not even consider smaller changes, yet I think the people who took on smaller projects had the most impressive final products.

Overall I know this class was an invaluable addition to my coursework. I still have a lot to learn and plan to practice via Codecademy and other sites so I can better understand the baby steps that will one day lead to the overarching objectives I hope to achieve in both my personal and professional work.