Getting to smART

I can hardly believe that 7 weeks ago I started General Assembly’s software engineering immersive, and I’ve already built my first full-stack web application. Time flies when you’re working hard, and as someone with a proclivity for grinding my nose this is pushing me even harder than I imagined. The rewards are sweet and worth the late nights of pounding keys and working through the latest set of problems.

Our second project was a major change from the first. We switched from frontend to backend, and in the process picked up a lot of new tools for the toolbox (ex. Express, MongoDB, Mongoose, and some middlewear to glue it all together). In two short weeks, we picked up a whole new way of thinking and building a website. Even after years as a Project Manager working on full-stack websites for clients, I grew a lot as an engineer. 

We had almost full control over the scope of this project. I decided to merge the two things I’m passionate about most: beautifully built applications and fine art. smART is for fine artists of all ages to share inspiration and techniques.

Fifteen years of project planning came in handy, and coupled with hands on understanding of MVC architecture I was excited to dive into the planning process. I started by defining the user story before building out a set of wireframes to help me understand the best approach. The vision was clear, but the hardest part of creating an MVP is deciding what isn’t needed and gets pushed back to future releases, or removed all together.

With the user story defined and wireframes laid out I easily understood the schema and was able to knock out the site architecture in short order. I was ready to code.

In a matter of just four days, I went from a slide deck outlining my project plan to a fully realized MVP application. I spent those days working on setting up routers, models, and views, along with a fair amount of styling to get things looking clean and working across every screen size I could test. 

I wanted to get it beyond the MVP and managed to get all of my silver level features completed, along with a few gold, which expanded the MVP’s focus on tutorials to also include short artist biographies and a shared index view. 

My favorite challenges were in the details of getting fully functional CRUD for each collection. Dates in MongoDB work differently than the ones we’d learned during JavaScript so I learned to work with ISO dates, and after a quick helper function was built I was able to get it looking good on the artist’s view.

As an artist, I know the work is never done, but I’m thrilled with how far I was able to get in just a few days. When I get done with the immersive I plan to dive back into the project and work on getting it ready for the wild. I’m excited that I’ve already had interest from art teachers and other artists. I’m excited to see this fledgeling project take off, and no matter where it journeys once it’s out in the wilds I learned a lot about full-stack using Express and MongoDB.

More About the Project

If you’re interested in the application, project plan, code, reporting bugs, or suggesting features check out these links.

smART: https://sm-art.herokuapp.com

Project Plan: https://github.com/jaredsmorgan/smART/blob/master/smART-proj-plan.pdf

GitHub Repo: https://github.com/jaredsmorgan/smART

GitHub Bug/Feature Tickets: https://github.com/jaredsmorgan/smART/issues