Week 6 of Bootcamp

Adventures in Weather

By Keisha Shepherd

Written 12/11/2019

Oh, the Weather Dashboard. I spent countless hours trying to get the weather app assignment completed. I did a lot of research and planning to get it working the way I wanted. I really don’t know why it was so hard. I was sad because of my grandmother’s passing and I had to do another remote class the day of the funeral. We were assigned to our projects that day too. So there just wasn’t time to waste.

The main challenge for the Weather Dashboard was using the open weather map api. It’s a server-side API that allows you to query a city and get the current forecast, 5-day forecast, ultra-violet index, and much more. I unfortunately in the last week misread the W-3 School’s Javascript best practices and declared all of my variables at the top of my code. The TA and another student that I asked to review it both were not fans of this way of coding. So, for the 5-day forecast I redid it and it was a lot easier. I also tried to use ES-6 concepts that I had not yet been taught but saw in Jonathan Augustine’s code-base on GitHub. Based on what happened with the code generator when I had 400 lines and Jonathan had 50 lines to achieve the same thing, I’ve been trying to do what Jonathan would do. It’s been difficult because ES-6 looks so different from regular functions.

What Worked!

What worked well for me to get my assignment in on time, were a few things:

• Researched
When I spend time researching I can get a better handle on what’s expected
• Drew Wire Frames
Drawing wire-frames and then coding to the design really helped me to stay focused. But this bit me later on because my designs were not for mobile but for desktop.
• Asked for feedback early
When I ask for feedback earlier in the process, it really aids with making better design decisions, staying focused, and saving time. It’s true that when you find things wrong later in the process, it’s harder to make the correct fixes down the line.

What I Should have Done

• Code for mobile-first
When the TA reviewed my site he recognized quickly that it wasn’t designed to be mobile-friendly. So I had to do a lot of rework to get it to look nice with different sizes. One thing that helped was with each media query for min or max widths, I changed the background color, that way I knew if it looked nice in every view.
• Not misread the best practices
Because I misread the best practices, I need to do a lot of refactoring on my weather dashboard to make it readable. I declared all of my variables in the beginning of the document. Given the time available, it doesn’t seem like it will happen. I have a working product but I’d really like the code-base to be more solid.