It's a Bird! It's a Plane! No, It's Meteor!
23 Mar 2017
Getting Ready for Blast Off
Lately, I’ve been learning the building blocks for using Meteor to build an application. It’s been a bumpy road filled with much rage and frustration along with excitement and curiosity. I’ll admit that I was overwhelmed with putting together the concept of client-side code, server-side code, HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc. all together to make one application. As a full-stacked JavaScript framework, it was intimidating to dive straight in. However, after getting my feet wet, I found that Meteor can be quite friendly to beginners and an extremely useful tool for experts.
One Small Step for Software Engineering
Installing Meteor and becoming familiar with how it worked was quite the challenge at first. However, I built up my knowledge with a few practice projects. It was difficult to understand spacebars, templates, and helpers and how they all interacted with one another. I found myself asking questions such as “how do I route my home page to this page?” and “how do I allow the user to update this table, and change it on the server?”. As a beginner, I tried to soak up as much information as I could building practice applications via tutorials. Eventually, I grasped a better understanding of how to efficiently use the tools it offers and it has sparked my interest in wanting to create bigger, more complex projects. I feel that my horizon has been expanded by learning how to use Meteor.
Houston, we have several problems…
I would definitely say that there is a steep learning curve for Meteor. You’re only limited to how far you want to go with your application, and how much you actually want to know; which can also be said about a lot of things. I was intimidated by Meteor at first because I had very limited knowledge of building client-server applications or their architecture. If it hadn’t been for those practice tutorials, I most likely would have given up learning Meteor and tried to move on to something new or simpler.
One of the biggest frustrations with Meteor that I had, was building new applications. Creating a new repository and setting up a new application for the first time eats up a tremendous amount of time. Although you could use the time to take a break, drink some coffee, or do some reading, it would be nice to be able to immediately get started on building your application. Waiting for Meteor to finish running meteor npm run start in Terminal or Command Prompt is such a hassle, and the fact that the progress bar is practically useless makes it even worse!
My Astronomical Experience
Overall, I’ve had a positive experience working with Meteor. It’s definitely helped simplified the idea of building web applications for me. Now that I have a better understanding of application architecture, I feel more confident in my skills to work with others and build more complex projects in the future.