Week 9 @ Encora Academy (Build Something From Scratch)

In the ninth week at Encora Academy we delivered the final product of this phase in which we were working for the last month.

This week I learned a lot from the beginning. On Monday, I was dealing with a dependencies issue that I installed locally, and when I tried to upload the changes into Github, my teammates couldn’t run my changes, so I deleted my project locally, and when I tried to run it, again, it threw me an error that I couldn’t identify, so I went to the internet, and copy the first thing that I found because I was desperate to solve the issue, and the result was a tragedy. I deleted all my files on my computer with the rm command I don’t know how…

At first, I wanted to cry because I lost a lot of work that I’ve been doing for the past months, and also the code that I had written in my IDE. Then I realized that I couldn’t recover anything, so I just moved on. I just started at zero and try to recover as soon as possible.

The following days, it was just about finishing everything on the project, making sure that everything worked well before deployment. I finished the notification system, which we managed sending emails for appointments, for registers, for appointment cancelations, and so on.

By Wednesday, we started deploying our project. We chose Heroku, which was a whole new thing for me. I learned the deploying process and the problems that come with it.

The next day, we faced with compatibility issues, the web app doesn’t work well with iOS devices because they manage calendars in a different format, as well as some other visual details.

By Friday, we had our last demo, where everything went well, although we did it locally.

Then we discovered some other details, that if you enter the app through the HTTP protocol instead of HTTPS, you couldn’t log in for some reason. And lastly, the thing that we found was that we have to keep in mind that servers have to default UTC, so we have to code keeping this in mind.

Conclusion

This week was tough. I learned by the bad way that I have to be careful of what commands I put in my computer and to read well before I do anything. I learned a lot about technical issues from Nodejs and its promises to deployment tools, but where I learned most was from my teammates. Everybody was always in their best disposition to help each other. I learned a lot about git and Github thanks to them and how to be for each other. This phase was very special to me, and I’m really looking forward to see what comes in the next phases.