As another week comes to an end, let’s look back to what we learned during these past few days.

This past week felt a bit grueling, as I wasn’t able to make much progress in the project I’ve been working on, or at least it didn’t feel like it, as I had to retrace my steps a couple of times over in order to ensure everything was working as we intended. This is a paradox I’ve encountered many times over while being in this program, that feeling that nothing much was accomplished merely because of the fact that not a lot of visual or tangible progress was made, or because the original goalpost was moved farther than it was at the start of the week. This loop is rather annoying, and while recognizing it is certainly progress, I still need to get a hold of the feelings it brings with it, as they can become rather cumbersome and stressful.

Moving onto more technical aspects for this week, I mainly focused on forms. In the project that I’m helping with, this involved using Formik with React in order to fulfill the task that we had assigned. While I’ve worked with Formik before, this time it was more of a challenge, since I had to conditionally validate fields according to which fields were chosen before. Handling each field and ensuring the right behavior (such as allowing to proceed if a field is not displayed) sounds simple in practice, but as I learnt this week, can be quite time consuming and error prone, which requires special care in how we approach the issue in order to ensure simplicity and avoid spaghetti code.

As an extra for this week, I was able to squeeze a little bit of Angular each day, which allowed me to finish the section of the course I had been working on. The section focused in providing a gentle introduction to the concept of ngForm by creating a simple signUp and logIn email form, which used Firebase in order to store the user’s credentials. The exercise allowed me to understand several pieces of information provided by Angular’s forms in order to validate, store and manipulate data in the forms that we make. I also was able to get a little glimpse into some of Firebase’s authentication capabilities, as the app only used email as its only method. While this was a relatively simple app, it allowed me to feel more confident in creating a proper authentication channel, which I believe will be of great help in the near future.

That would be all for this week. See you in the next one!

Angular_form