Mar 4, 2021
What have I learned in Lambda School? My Labs Experience.
My time at Lambda School is coming to an end. After over a year of endless nights, and what felt like unlearnable material at times, I made it to the end; Labs. My Labs project was an exciting one! I worked on a project called CitySpire. We noticed an issue when people made plans to move to, or visit, a new place. It can be fairly easy to find details on a place that you’re interested in. However, when you want to compare multiple locations to one another, that’s when the issue arises. We aimed to solve that problem with CitySpire, and we had a great vision for it.
I was worried that after spending so long in the Computer Science portion of the curriculum at Lambda, that I would have trouble remembering what I learned so early in the program. I was right. I had a very difficult time remembering how to do some of the simplest things in JavaScript after spending the last four months in Python doing algorithms and data structures. I spent a few days re-familiarizing myself with the course material and studying notes I’d taken along the way. In doing so, I realized just how much I actually learned over the last fifteen months. I’m a real-life developer now. I know things that my friend with a master’s degree in CS doesn’t even know. I blew my own mind going back through my past projects, knowing that I built these things. It took some time, and to be completely honest is still in progress, but things started coming back to me. I was ready to take on the challenge of Labs and was excited to dive into the CitySpire project.
Let’s look a little closer at the Project itself.
The sky is the limit with CitySpire. When we built our user flows, wireframes, and design systems, we had a great idea of what direction we wanted to take the project. We had a basic architecture established to aid in our setup efforts.
The first task I completed was deploying the backend API. I used Heroku for the deployment.
After having an API up and running, we were able to build our front end. Our team managed to tackle separate tasks both individually and in a pair programming manner. We were able to get a few components completed and make progress on the larger tasks.
We built out several components such as our City Form, Style Components, City Info, State, and Search Component. We ran into our first real issue when trying to implement the Mapbox API. We took this opportunity to approach the issue as a team, and pair-program to debug. The main issue was our environment variables, after sorting that issue out everything was working perfectly. We had a form:
And we had a way to visualize the returned data:
Our map was rending the requested information. My team was full of rockstars, and pair-programming allowed us to solve the issue together.
What does the future of CitySpire have in store?
It’s exciting to think about where CitySpire will be in the future. Right now the project is in the earliest stages and has nowhere to go but up. We currently have a skeletal structure built, but we have user flows, wireframes, Trello, and Figma structures as a roadmap for development.
With the future in mind, it would make for a great user experience for the app to allow a user to view detailed stats about cities, landmarks, parks, states, countries, and other locations. While accessing that data the user would then be able to compare multiple locations’ crime stats, walkability score, cost of living, population, local job industries, and school ratings; among other things. These features would take a bit more data science work but seem feasible. This project was very helpful for me to get a very real sense of what actual industry work is like. I feel far more ready to start work with a company and its existing codebase. Lambda has been a rollercoaster, but I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I feel ready to take on the responsibility that comes with the role of a software engineer.
