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Discussion on: What I Learned From Not Planning A Web App (from start to finish)

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Tomaz Lemos • Edited

Hi Jen, you’re right, I’ve been very fortunate to have been working with fine developers who are eager to instruct me and with whom I’ve been able to get along well. That’s really priceless and without that there would be no app or anything like that.

I’m usually tend to have a more thoughtful approach to things (or not? rs), but for this particular app I set an kind of absurd goal of having something new to show every day to my colleagues, so I just code enough to get things done and refactor as needed. I think it’s some kid of twisted TDD, rs, if it passes the (manual) tests, that’s good enough.

Working with spring boot has been a breeze, it literally took me a few minutes to get the app up and running (which for a Java developer is a great achievement, it usually took hours of configurations and framework choosing). I don’t even have to write repository classes, just the interfaces, Spring knows what to do by the method name (!), and doesn’t care if I’m on sql or MongoDB.

Having lots of trouble to understand MongoDB principles tough, but I think I’m starting to think in a way it helps me, and not in a “how I do this sql stuff in it” way. I’m not sure it’s really the right tool for the job tough, as I have to deal with a lot of numbers and calculations with data I can structure, so maybe I’m going to change to a mixed approach, but no hurry into making that call.

I kind of ended up with a single class which contains all the other classes I need for my views, and I crawl through a cache of it when I need some specific information inside. Not a very optimized approach, but once the app is online things happens really fast, so that’s ok for now.

Some teams in my company are using a Angular 4 / Java stack, I’d really like to try that. How was learning angular 1, did you enjoy it, or was it a too steep learning curve?

Glad to hear you’re getting joy too, I think we’re very fortunate to be able to work with something we really enjoy doing!