The project I have been working on is an app for veterinarians to calculate medication dosages for their animal patients. Our team decided to split the work up, where each team member worked on one portion of the project.
My responsibilities have been to implement a web app for the admin to access the database. This is where they can create, edit or delete specific information about different medications for each animal.
Initially, I thought this would be a simple CRUD application, but it proved to be a bit more complicated than that. Also, I have only created a couple of web apps previously, and although I enjoy the act of designing and creating web applications, I am not very comfortable with the entire process. This was great practice for me!
One thing that proved difficult for me was starting the application and learning as I went. This made it tough because had I known what I know now, I would have structured the architecture of my code differently to make the process easier.
Another struggle I’ve had was learning how to connect the database to the web app. I don’t have any experience using axios, which seems to be the best way to access the data for this particular project. It’s been a learning curve but I’ve noticed I have a tendency to overthink these things and make it seem more complicated that it actually is.
Something that I learned along the way was the semantic-ui library and specifically the Modal component. This made creating my edit button relatively easy. The boilerplate code in the semantic-ui docs for the Modal created a popup, where I just had to edit the content within the popup to create the form, with the data prefilled in for the user to edit.
Overall, this project has been a great mix of challenging and engaging. I’ve learned a lot along the way that I hope to be able to take on to my future projects. I know that it’s hard to start a project when you’re not very comfortable in the frameworks, because “you don’t know what you don’t know”. This has given me a few more tools to add to my toolbox of knowledge, that will hopefully help me out in the future.
