This was the first work of real development on our project and today I want to talk about the frustration of configuring new tools (and the reward for perseverance).
I have struggled throughout this program with setting up new tools. There is usually a good walkthrough on how to get started but somewhere along the way something always seems to go wrong. I imagine this is exactly how it works in the real world too! However, being new to the process it is easy to get frustrated when things don’t work as planned. My most recent struggle with tools started with trying to get a Flutter app up and running for my mobile development class. Our task was to get the Flutter SDK set up and run a simple app. This involved installing the Flutter SDK, getting VS Code set up with Flutter, getting Android Studio set up and finally running the app. Well, for the life of me I couldn’t get the app to compile. First I needed Java, then I needed JDK, then I started getting even more error codes than when I started! It took me about three hours of searching through the Flutter documentation and googling the various error messages when I started to think that maybe this just wasn’t going to work for me. I felt so frustrated. Then I found a diamond in the rough—I found a post where somebody said that the Flutter version I was using didn’t support the JDK version I was using. I downgraded JDK to the proper version and voile—the app ran! I was truly exhilarated.
Fast forward to a couple days ago when I was setting up the Ionic framework for our capstone project. I went through similar frustrations and spent hours trying to sort out what I was doing wrong. I eventually found the problem and rectified it and the app ran! Again I felt such elation when I finally managed to get everything working as expected.
In both situations, I felt such despair in the middle of troubleshooting. But when I finally got things working, I felt such joy. The reward for perseverance was worth the frustration. I came out of each project with a sense of accomplishment and confidence in my ability to succeed.
