It’s finally come to the end of our first project week at CodeClan, and I thought it’d be good to recap what I’ve learned in the last 7 days developing a simple money tracking app.

Firstly, It can’t be stressed enough how important the planning phase is. I think I spent a whole (admittedly rushed) morning and afternoon developing the various components that make up the User Experience part of the app development process. As part of our training we learned how to create user profiles, journeys and sitemaps that underpin both the front- and back-end development process.

One thing I was aware of was that I initially felt that I should have been sitting at a computer from the get-go; and that every minute spent not typing up CURD methods was a minute wasted. Thankfully, I remembered warnings from instructors and previous cohorts alike that putting time in planning will definitely save you time later on.

One aspect of the planning that I overlooked was the wireframing, in which you sketch a simple layout of what each view of your app is meant to look like. Being too preoccupied about what I wanted the app to do meant that I didn’t pay much attention to what I wanted it to look like. This makes the front-end developing stage a lot more time consuming than it needs to be, as much time is wasted in aimless iterating.

All in all, I was quite pleased with the app that I made. I wish I had more time to spend on it to add some of the features I’d thought about, but I was able to meet MVP and work on the extensions. Considering how little we knew about programming before starting the course, I think we made pretty remarkable progress for 5 weeks!

The link to the repo on GitHub is here, which contains the presentation I prepared to go with the app demo. Enjoy!