Pressing Brakes

This week was rather unproductive in the sense that I made no apparent progress towards any of my designs. But saying this whole week was a waste wouldn’t be accurate either as I have made some progress, albeit in a different sense.

Creating a small Single Page Application with a framework like Vuejs is relatively easy and even a novice could pick it up fairly quickly. As the project starts to scale, however, it becomes increasingly difficult to monitor all the changes and ensure the functionality remains intact. If the foundations themselves are weak then any structure you wish to build on top of your code will be prone to damage easily.

When I wrote my code previously I fell into the trap whereby I tried to build everything in a result-oriented way instead of process-oriented and thus ended up adopting all sorts of unadvised practices to reach my goal.

A prime example of this would be how I used Vue’s conditional directives to render components in and out of the DOM and used just a single html and js file to write all my code. While doing so allowed me to avoid using routers and state management systems like you would in a traditional web development project, little did I realize that the seed I was sowing would eventually grow out into a behemoth of a program and I would eventually have to cut it from its roots and start all over again.

And that is precisely what I spent a majority of this week doing. I learned Vue Router and Vuex at an accelerated pace and then began a migration from my previous implementation of the program to the recommended industry standard.

Being largely unfamiliar with these two libraries I came across several hindrances that slowed me down but as I kept programming I realized that using all these tools and doing coding the right way makes it so much more succinct and readable. I have to track far fewer things manually and thus I can leave the tedious bits to the program structure and handle the fun parts of the coding myself.

The migration process got delayed because of some unexpected bugs but I am hopeful that by this coming week I shall be able to finish the migration and complete the User Interfaces.