The Best Love-Hate Relationship (For A CS Student)
23 Mar 2017As a computer science major, I have dealt with several different languages, platforms, coding standards and operating systems. With each new “relationship” I forged, I’m trying to see which relationship I like the best, the one relationship I will have fond memories of, not ones where I can see myself crying in the middle of the night for some reason or other. However, with meteor, I decided that it is the best love-hate relationship I’ll ever have.
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First Comes The Hatred…
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In short, Meteor is one of the most confusing things when I had to learn first start out. From the beginning, it seemed like I was destined to fail. I didn’t know what meteor was, the benefits of using meteor, or even how to create a web application. So I felt that I was constantly in a losing battle of deciding whether my errors were from my lack of experience building a web application or from Meteor itself. (I must say, however, that I am glad I have a Macbook since I seem to have a lot less problem with Meteor than some of my other classmates that had windows)
During the first few assignments I had with meteor, I was constantly taking a long time to do them since I was always looking up how to do this or how to do that. However, much like any other language, I was able to start remembering the commands to do certain things, so I eventually began to do my assignments faster.
I admit that I hated meteor because I didnʻt understand it and there really wasnʻt an “easy” way for me to learn meteor without having to make my own mistakes. I remember when I first started working on an assignment called Digits, I actually had to trash my first few attempts because I did something wrong, which caused my app to keep crashing, and I couldn’t figure out exactly what I did wrong.
However, when I was working on the third part of the Digits assignment, things finally began to click in my head why we were writing the code in this way, why we put certain files in this particular folder, etc. It was my breakthrough point to actually loving meteor.
Then Comes Love…
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Once I started to understand just how meteor was working, I was able to complete the WODʻs at a much faster time and I actually even bagan enjoying writing these codes on Meteor. Take for instance, the first digits assignment. I definitely DNFʻd the first time (Partially because invoking the command “meteor –settings ../config/settings.development.json” took quite a bit of time). The second time, I did alright,getting a time of about 38:38. However, once I began to understand meteor and its dynamics, I was able to complete this WOD in 28:27!
I must admit that I now appreciate the fact that I am able to use Javascript with meteor, not only because I enjoyed writing in Javascript, but because I feel that I am able to do so much more with a lot less code. It is really amazing for me to be able one line that used to take me 8 lines.
In conclusion…
It was quite exciting for me to create all these web apps and know that I can make things like the digits app (This is one of the reasons why I chose computer science actually … Iʻm always amazed to see how lines of code can turn into amazing things such as web apps and games.) Of course, Iʻm still no expert in using meteor or even writing in JavaScript, however, Iʻm really excited to learn more about what I can do with meteor and see how far I can go on my own. Maybe some day I will choose meteor as the “best” one.