The Battle

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Web vs. Mobile. My journey to becoming a developer started with web… quickly pivoting to mobile once I realized I HATED web development. I love the idea of building something that people will use; something that can serve a real purpose in someone’s life. Will it help them find love? Provide additional income? Be used as a crutch to lean on when you are uncomfortable out in public and not wanting to make eye contact with anyone? In any case, I found all of my ideas were more so catered to mobile apps so I decided to practice within this realm of programming.

The Holy Trinity

YouTube, Udemy and Stack Overflow: my three main sources of learning a new language. YouTube has way more tutorials than anyone can ever follow along with to learn how to program. Are they always the best out there or in line with your current skill level? Probably not. I find that a lot of tutorials on YouTube can help establish a baseline understanding of learning a new language, but at times do a very poor job in practicing good programming conventions such as refactoring, testing, etc. I have always enjoyed Udemy and following along with the course structures I would purchase. I think there is something about paying to learn that gives you an extra boost of motivation to sit down and get going when your discipline is lacking. Stack Overflow was never my go to to learn a new language, but is always a good source once I start getting more specific in what I am trying to learn/figure out.

The Point

This capstone project will be thrusting me out of my comfort zone as I will need to utilize my Holy Trinity of learning to contribute my share of the group project. My top choice project I chose was “Dating app for animal adoption.” I had pictured being well into my comfort zone and imagined a semester of building this app using IntelliJ as my IDE and Dart/Flutter to create the mobile app. Being in a group of four, three of which having plans to create a web application – I knew it was best to agree and get out of my ways and learn how to create a site using Python/Flask. At OSU, two required courses are based around web development (CS 290 – Web Development and CS 340 – Intro to Databases). I had skated by in each course using HTML/JavaScript since I had a brief experience of creating websites with that combination. Luckily, I have some documentation from CS 340 that provides tutorials on using Python and Flask.

The Near Future

My discipline will be playing a large part in learning how to create web apps with Python/Flask; a very welcomed challenge. I do not want to let my teammates down and will do what I can to do what is needed to create a great site. My ideal situation (later to be revisited) is if The Battle is back on – Will mobile development prevail? Will web development give mobile a run for its money? Tune in next week on… well… my blog posts.