Final Recap —The Flatiron School Experience… and a little destructuring

I have made it through the Flatiron School full-time Software Engineering course, and boy, it was a wild ride! They aren’t joking when they explain the rollercoaster of emotions you’ll handle throughout the entire experience. That being said, I am insanely grateful for the new skills I have acquired and the people I have been lucky to meet and work alongside.

The most coding experience I had before October of last year was pretty much just adding sparkly text and some background music to a very lame Myspace page. I was working for Uber before Covid-19 hit and was in a good deal of contact with the Engineering Department. I was fascinated and confused by the world of Software Engineering, and the unfortunate event of being laid off gave me the perfect opportunity to give it a shot.

During my time at Flatiron the languages / frameworks that I have been exposed to and have learned from are:

Ruby
Ruby on Rails
Sinatra
SQLite3
HTML5
CSS
JavaScript
React.js
Redux.js

I can’t really say which one was more difficult than the other because each was challenging in its own way. But I will say I am excited to add features and build out most of the projects that I have made. Here is a little recap on each:

CLI:

• I paid homage to the queens of Ru Paul’s Drag Race and made a fun little command-line project that allows users to enter in a number between 1–10 to retrieve data on a specific competing drag queen.

Sinatra:

• Being a life-long sneaker collector, I decided to make a fashion blogging application. Users can log in, create, edit and delete posts that contain images. This was also my first time using any styling, and my project definitely shows it. I can’t wait to go back and actually make it look cool.

Rails:

• I worked alongside a classmate for this project, and she is super into Harry Potter. Our projects had some differences but we both created a portal in which users can log in via the app itself or using Google OAuth. They can then create spellbooks, and within the spellbooks can create a list of spells and assign different attributes such as “power strength” and “spell categories”. I really got my feet wet with the styling process here. All of my pages had different backgrounds and visually, it was a super fun project.

Javascript:

• Being a bartender in NYC for 10 years, I wanted to make something to reflect that time of my life. I created a SPA (single-page application) that allows users to click on drinks and rate and review them. I struggled pretty bad with Javascript. I learned the most towards the end whilst building out different features such as a search filter and a dark mode.

React:

• The finale! I got a late start on my project for React after being hit by a tornado. But I am still proud of what I was able to pull together in the time I had. I decided to build a to-do list application because I am constantly forgetting important items and chores. I added an extra feature, which was a clickable link to a carousel of happy animal pictures, just in case my users need a reason to smile. It turned out to be my favorite feature.

During the final review of my React project, I struggled to explain the concept of “destructuring”. The first and most obvious problem I faced was the fact that I was calling it “deconstructing” (jeez). After doing some internet research I will do my best not to butcher it a second time.

Destructuring:

• It was first introduced in ES6.
• It is a JavaScript feature that allows us to extract multiple pieces of data from an array or object and assign them to their own variables, therefore enabling faster access to nested data. This means you no longer have to iterate over an array or object multiple times to retrieve properties of its nested children. Nice!!
• It can greatly simplify how you write props, improving readability.
• It enables faster access to nested data.
• It helps avoid errors. When abstracting your components into different files, it gives you a handy place to quickly reference what props you’re passing down without having to switch tabs.

I have a lot more to learn but I am glad to have the foundations to be able to build on. Flatiron School has been the most amazing life-changing experience. I have a new passion for success and I am so eager to see where the next step will take me