Lookback

Well here we are; somehow it’s already almost the end of the course. Let’s ruminate on how it went, shall we?

Discuss your biggest success during the course.

My group’s project is a data visualization client for an industry sponsor, and I am one of the members who has been working on data mapping. My biggest success has to be when I was first able to shelve the dummy data I’d been working with and get live server data to render dynamically, colored and styled appropriately for a heat map. Not a success of one by any means — our team is larger than I think most in this course tend to be, and I wasn’t the one doing most of the work to hook up the pipes — and not the only time I punched the air in triumph after a few hours muttering angrily at devtools and adding a new console.log. But getting server data to display in beautiful, semi-random blobs had me punching the air the highest.

What was your breakthrough, and why did it matter?

They were mostly small breakthroughs piled together, and I think that’s a nice lesson to apply to development work going forward. One was realizing that I could re-map data to the correct format extremely easily after a week or so of thinking it needed to be done on the server-side or through a separate library. Another was realizing I had been trying to use a string like a json without having first unpacked it (when I said small breakthroughs, I meant small and kind of embarrassing).

What did you learn, about the technology, and also about yourself?

I guess all together the small breakthroughs forced me to practice walking through and explaining to myself what I’d written, what was happening in localhost:3000, what I expected to happen in localhost:3000, and why the two were different. It’s easy to get lost conflating ‘what I think I wrote’ and ‘what I actually wrote’, for me at least, and I enjoy the reminder to recenter. Also, now I want to make maps of everything.