The following is based on my experience as a Flatiron student and is offered up in all humility. Some of what I write to you I sensed from the start, but most of it I did not understand right away, and looking back, wished I had. This is not meant to be articulate prose or necessarily a well written blog post, rather, just some thoughts that may be helpful to the successful navigation of the course, while gleaning the most substantial return.
Why I did I make the decision to learn to code?
For my final project, I built a video tutorial note taking application, implementing a React-Redux frontend UI with a Rails API backend. A user signs in using Google and can then search the Youtube API for video tutorials. Upon finding and selecting a tutorial the user can then take notes during the tutorial which are persisted to the Rails backend data base when a note is created, and can be retrieved, edited or deleted.
For my JavaScript project, I decided to build a Movie Trivia Game. A player can sign in with a username to play and then select from a list of movies, each movie displaying a list of trivia quizzes about that movie. Once a quiz is selected, questions and answer options are displayed. When the player selects answers from the multiple choice options (each question has four answer options) a completed quiz is submitted and a quiz result is returned to the player with each original question, the player’s selected answer, the correct answer, and a short movie scene description that explains the context of each answer. When the quiz result is displayed, the players game statistics are updated with a quiz score and total points accrued towards advancing through player rating levels starting at ‘Level 1 Novice’ and progressing through intermediate levels, with ‘Level 4 Master of Movie Trivia’ as the ultimate top level player rating.
For my Rails Portfolio Project, I chose to build a basic CRM (Customer/Client Relationship Management) web application. CRM apps range from simple contact management apps to complex lead & deal management apps which implement sophisticated automation, analytics, and AI. After some quick research, I took a close look at some apps on the more basic end of the spectrum, like Google Contacts and Clevertim, to better understand features and functionality. I decided to build a basic contacts/multipurpose CRM application.