After all the complaints I had during the previous modules learning about Git, configuration management, coding standards, and Meteor framework, I’m glad to say that all the pain has paid off. Although the beginning of the semester was often boring and frustrating, I’m relieved to have finished the website, with compliments from test users, professors, and other students. It feels great, man. It really makes you appreciate all those nice websites you visit, and sympathize with the old, ratty ones. Web development is hair-tearing. But very, very worth it.
Learning Meteor, especially, was the worst. A month into the semester, we had to install Meteor, a web development framework. It wasn’t fun. My professor told us then that Meteor wouldn’t work well with Windows (thanks for the heads up!) Not only did it take me extra time to install Meteor, but when I did finally install it, Meteor still ran untenably slow. It took ten to fifteen minutes to setup, and making changes to the code took another four or five. It doesn’t seem like much, but a few small errors and changes adds up. - especially for someone like me, who changes one line of code at a time. I had to adapt. I changed larger chunks of code and hardest of all, allotted more time to web development. I finally got used to Meteor, and web development eventually became much easier.
I probably still won’t become a web developer. I won’t forget the Javascript or the html, both of which comes almost naturally now. But I don’t think I could do this everyday for the next thirty-something years of my life. But the best part of this software engineering course, was that doing all of this wasn’t the point. It was more about learning what I needed, learning it, and applying it. I can do that in six months, and that’s pretty cool. And thanks to Professor Johnson, whose course helped me learn this, even though he didn’t tell me about Windows.