Table of contents
Hello guys. Welcome to my first ever blog post on Hashnode. I came across a tweet that emphasizes documenting your tech journey, especially as a junior dev. So here's to documentation.
In the beginning
I never really saw myself becoming a developer. I didn't even study anything related to computer science for my undergraduate degree but look where I found myself. Back in my third year, my school introduced us to a group of compulsory courses of which we were to select one. I picked Application Development and I'm really glad I did.
The first class was basically introduction to the web in general, differences between libraries and frameworks, frontend and backend, and the various languages out there.
As time passed, we started HTML and CSS, learnt the basics, got grouped and did various projects. It felt nice to perform magic with my hands and laptop but I knew I was just getting started and what I was doing wasn't magic.
At the end of the session, each student was given a task, to find a problem in their surroundings and provide a solution using all they'd learnt during the session. I decided to solve a problem regarding transportation.
The Problem
On campus, we had shuttles that took people (students, staffs and other visitors) to various destinations. The process involved:
- Going to the shuttle stand.
- Buying a ticket.
- Waiting for the bus to arrive.
- Showing the ticket to the conductor upon arrival of the bus.
- Boarding the bus to one's destination.
The problem with this was that you had to go to the ticket stand before you could purchase a ticket and still not know exactly when the bus would arrive, thus waiting for quite an indefinite time.
The Solution
What other better solution than to make the manual process also available via a web app? I thought it would be nice to buy tickets online, track the current location of the bus, and also pick a seat number from the web app.
The App
The name of the app was "Shuttle Express". The technology stacks used were HTML, CSS, JS and PHP. The web app had 4 pages; registration, login, dashboard, and the printout page and the logic was pretty simple.
- Sign up or Login
- Pick your destination and seat number
- Save your ticket as a PDF to be shown at the ticket stand.
While this was my first ever fullstack project, it lacked a lot of things, but I gained courage to push on and furthermore empower myself in the tech world.
Conclusion
I don't have any regrets becoming a developer despite the frustration that comes with it but it's one of the things that keeps me going and there's no giving up in my dictionary.
🥂 Here's to documenting my journey, little wins and any other thing that comes too mind.