It was a long journey but we did it fellows (and I finally have time to update the blog TT)
Hey everyone, welcome back to a very very very delayed post blast.
Anyway, it has been a wild ride, the past 10 weeks, starting from the idea confirmation stage to execution and finally the fine-tuning portion of the project. Anyway for those who don’t have a good idea of what I am talking about, all ZJU exchange students are obliged to complete a theme project tailored to a certain area of expertise. For myself, I am involved in this theme project called Data2Video, which is the conversion of data (数据) into a short video (可视化短视频) in a nutshell (Data Visualisation). (Hehe flex Chinese)
Up til Week 10
Up til Week 10, we were very much still in the ideation phase, as it was important to have a concrete idea of what we wanted at the end of the tunnel. However, we realised that that was actually a very serious misconception, which I would explain later. From then on, we started to focus on the technical portion of the project. This was a very tedious but very much fruitful part, because all 6 of us started with no experience in front end web development and its languages (HTML, CSS, JavaScript), much less the big picture, Data Visualisation.
Technical Requirements
Moving on to this technical portion, we had to learn three coding languages as follows.
- HTML, for the basic structural development of a webpage,
- CSS, for the style and beautification of the webpage,
- JavaScript, for advanced feature development (and creating out of the world aesthetics)
It definitely wasn’t easy, as we had to finish a cumulative 600 hours course, and that was just for starters. Thereafter, we had to apply it through assignments, which got exponentially difficult over time. Lastly, we were asked to recreate an advanced data visualisation webpage developed by a few seniors and subsequently add features according to our ideas.
[Just a short interruption but for front end web development, especially beginners, please consider freecodecamp, because it is rather comprehensive and it’s very step by step, it’s easy to understand as well. ]
Challenges and what was important
Well, like they say, the most difficult part in accomplishing a task was to actually getting started on it. As greenhorns in the field of data, we were very afraid of failure, which caused a very huge delay in the project due to our reluctance in applying what we have learnt into the project. But moving forward, as we pushed our comfort zone and started on the project proper, we realised that what was scary wasn’t that we didn’t know, but it was scary that we didn’t try. After we took the first step to give it a shot, we realised that failure wasn’t that daunting after all. In fact, as more failures set in, the more we were pumped to get rid of these failures and obstacles along the way, which made us stronger, both as a person and as a professional coder.
Moving on
Right now we are still trying to fix all these small details but really, I hope that by the time this project ends, we would be proficient (in some sense), and more importantly, develop the passion and the courage to continue on this journey of data analysis and data visualisation.
And that’s all for now, peace!
Ps. Really look forward to what we can produce in the end 😀
Ps2. A cat booster to boost our morale 🙂
