Crashing into Meteor
20 Oct 2016
Meteor is a blazing hot flamework. Literally. It has crashed my poor aging Windows laptop several times, and I have a suspicion that the stress of building and rebuilding my apps on my overworked processor is to blame. I’m hoping with the holiday sales and the new batch of Macs probably coming out later this year that I can find something high performance and marginally affordable, but I digress.
Meteor is a hot framework. I’ve heard of other web app frameworks before like Ruby on Rails or cakePHP, but have never really worked with them. Until now.
With Meteor, it’s great to see how all the lessons fit together in figuring out how to build something useful and pretty! Getting through the documentation was tough since it can be very dry. And sometimes even video tutorials aren’t really my thing. There is one online educational service called Lynda that I enjoy working with because it includes transcripts at the bottom. I find it difficult to keep track of the times in my class’s instructional assignment videos and associate them with different steps on those assignments, but having captions and transcripts at the bottom really helps out with navigating and retracing those steps.
After hours of work trying to follow app building tutorials and facing errors that prevent my app from compiling or otherwise running properly, it is so rewarding figuring out the bit of problem code and getting it to function properly! Running a CRUD app never looked so amazing.
Near the end of the multipart assignment we were working on this week, I ended typing out the steps taken to create the apps in those videos, and I think that helped me learn quite a bit! Taking time to type out the sections of code really familiarized me with all the functions that go on behind the scenes to get a meteor app running.
Meteor does have some notable issues while it builds and rebuilds. Initial builds of a meteor app take quite a bit of time. Also, using meteor with distributed version control services like github introduces some more complications. I had some trouble figuring out why my meteor app would break whenever I would try to switch to another branch. It would throw an error during the building process instead of running normally, so at that point I to avoid switching branches while working with meteor. For one assignment, I ended up basically copy pasting code from one repository to a new one after trying to figure out why my app kept throwing errors after a branch switch. I finally learned about resetting the database in meteor before switching branches, and with that knowledge, was able to safely switch between branches.
I’m very happy with the progress I’ve made gradually learning more about meteor. I’m hoping to create apps with location integration in the future for my software engineering class’s final project and for other future side projects!