Over the past week, I began to think about my portion of our team’s application. Our Capstone project being the job tracking app, my objective right now is to start figuring out how to build the job dashboard, where the end user can view the jobs they applied to, can edit them, and can add new jobs to the dashboard.

Figuring out how to go about this meant that I needed to start with the bigger picture first – learning how the MERN stack works. Since I have very limited experience with all parts of this stack – MongoDB, Express, React, and Node – I started by watching YouTube tutorials and reading articles to get a grasp on how it all fits together to create one complete app.

Once I had a better understanding, I dove into playing around with the React starter app, adding and removing different components to familiarize myself with the technology. Through multiple attempts, I was able to create a route to a /job-dashboard page where I created a simple table displaying the jobs with some dummy data.

This process reminded me of why I liked programming in the first place – to be able to learn new things on-the-go, and the sense of achievement when it all falls into place. I think this project will be a fun one.