Introduction

Are you a techy ? Then, you're probably aware that hands-on projects are very important. They help to have more experience in a specific domain. But especially when you are a developer, practical projects give you the opportunity to learn new ways to deal with bugs for instance.

At a certain time of its development cycle, a project can be very complex. Throughout my article, I will talk about the most difficult project I built and which experience I got from that.

A little story

Since I started with technology, I have worked on several projects that were very complex for me at a certain time. In fact, all the projects I built were not easy at all, they all required some expertise at a given moment. But, the project that challenged me the most is the development of a mobile application with Ionic Framework.

It happened when I was in my third year at university and had to do an academic internship in a startup, that offers physical courses in digital and want to make it open and accessible for everyone at anytime.

So, they decided to build a mobile application to perform that task. During the internship that lasted four months, I was given a lot of tasks but the main one was about the development of a mobile MOOC using Ionic and Wordpress.

Dealing with a new technology

Yes ! Ionic Framework and Wordpress to build a mobile application! Frankly speaking, the technologies choice were not from me, but the CEO of the startup, who is also a software engineer. She just told me that she made a lot of searches and Ionic was the best option for the work and that we just have to extract data from an existing website built with the well known CMS Wordpress.

Personnally, I was very excited because I was going to learn a new technology and apply it to a project and showcase it and be proud of it. Yes! But sincerely, I had no idea of the challenges that awaited me.

I had four months, two to learn the technology myself and intensively, two months to build the application (not fully, but I had to do the major part). And, I started ... Here are the main difficulties that discouraged me and made me feel like I was not born for that work.

Nobody to supervise my work

As a beginner, not in tech, but in a new technology I've never touched before, I had the need of a mentor. I needed someone who could guide me along my learning and I hadn't see anybody. My boss, was most of the time absent and It was not easy at all to join her. My friends knew nothing about Ionic, nothing that can help me to move ahead.

I just learnt, more and more and sometimes without knowing where I was actually going. Internet was there in fact, and it was the only tool that saved me. Thanks to Google, I practiced a lot as I was moving ahead. I joined some online communities and that helped enough. Even though I was frustrated, I kept on and I passed the two months of learning.

Starting with the application development

The other two months remaining were used for the project building. As I wrote up, I have to link the Ionic application to a website that has been built earlier with Wordpress.

It was a kind of something new I had to learn again and it took me two weeks to learn how to communicate with the website. Still fascinating, exciting, amazing but most of the time, I got stuck on some concepts and It was not funny at all.

When communicating with the website, some information didn't appear on the mobile application. It was either internet connection, or a bad request result. Most of the time, my days were full of headache and I spent more time on searching than coding.

The two months passed again, and I had to stop and resume university. But, the good news is that I made a half of this application (And I was proud of that), and even left a good documentation for the startup so that the next who will work on it, do it easily.

A lot of takeaways

It was an experience for me ! A great experience !

I was alone for a big project, very excited at the beginning, discouraged in the middle and finally proud. From that experience, I gain a lot, especially in self-pace learning. Thanks to that, I was able to set up the environment for an Ionic project and build it from scratch.

I was not helped by a physical person as I wanted but this was a blessing in disguish; it improves the way I made searches on Internet. Even if I was down and frustrated, I ended up with a great self-confidence. I learnt to learn and this was helpful for me in a way.