Why Web Developers Are More Than Just Web Developers
Recently, I got the opportunity to work with a team to develop for Village Book Builders. Village Book Builders is a non-profit organization who’s mission is to empower communities through education with the goal of ending the cycle of poverty. To achieve this goal, they build libraries in effected villages and pair students with mentors from around the world to better support them in their learning.
The Project
My team was tasked with using Ant Design to build an autocomplete search bar feature for Village Book Builder’s React application. From this search bar, a user should be able to search for a mentor or mentee and view and update the person’s information. Users should also be able to search for other features on the site, for instance the calendar or sign up forms. Ultimately, the search bar would not only make it easier for users to navigate the site, but also help keep mentee and mentor information up to date, allowing them to be more easily paired.
Not only did this project help me grow as a developer, but it reinforced an idea I have been slowly realizing as I enter this field:
Web developers are more than just web developers.
Want To Be A Web Developer? Learn How To Learn!
One of the challenges when it came to this project was that the organization required for us to use Ant Design. None of my team had worked with this library before, so we had to do some research before we started.
This type of “on the fly” learning seems to be typical in web development. For instance, on one of my earlier projects, my team decided to use Material UI (a library I was not familiar with at the time) to quickly get our forms up and running, and more recently I had to learn a great deal about Google’s Distance Matrix API for a freelance project.
For Village Book Builders, we decided to use Ant Design’s autocomplete search bar component to allow the user to search for and select mentors or mentees and features, and a modal component to display a selected mentor/mentee information.
A specific challenge I worked on was making sure the user was rerouted to a separate page when a feature was selected in the search bar. At this point in the project, the search bar only had the functionality of popping up a modal with mentor/mentee information when they are selected. A colleague and I worked together to hardcoding a list of features and their routes and used this to link them to their selection in the search bar.
Communication Is Key
With the code snippets above, we were able to reroute to the selected features, but there was still a problem: The mentor/mentee information modal was still popping up even when a feature was selected instead!
My colleague and I worked on this problem for a while, but we were having blockers on exactly where to put the logic to prevent this from happening. We decided to bring the problem to the rest of the team. Another teammate had the knowledge to solve the problem fairly quickly.
This isn’t the only time communication was essential in moving the project along. My teammates and my project manager became invaluable resources to help me problem solve or even just brainstorm with.
We had to meet with our team and communicate what we were working on everyday. There were days when poor communication led to teammates doing overlapping work or work which was not necessary, but when this happened, we moved forward and got better.
We had to communicate with the stakeholders of the company to ensure we understood what they needed us to deliver through writing and over Zoom. There were several times I got the opportunity to present our progress in stakeholder meetings and ask them questions. And at times, there were misunderstandings which took a bit of back and forth to resolve.
As a team, we also got the opportunity to communicate accolades and constructive criticism with each other. I got some very nice positive feedback from my teammates which made me feel valuable to my team, and I learned from my teammates that I should work on my confidence. I plan to do this by taking more calculated risks and putting myself out there more.
Doing More
As of now, we have completed the functionality of the autocomplete search bar and modal which pops up with mentor/mentee information when they are selected. An edit button on the modal also brings up a form to allow the selected mentor/mentee information to be changed. We are currently using mock data, but when Village Book Builders is able to seed their database, the API calls will be hooked up to display and edit this data.
I am very grateful that Lambda School and Village Book Builders gave me the opportunity to work on this feature. It was a valuable learning experience for my team and me. I learned more than ever that being a successful web developer is much more than knowing some code. You must be a researcher and a quick learner because there is a good chance you will have to use one of the countless technologies you have never been exposed to on any given project. You also have to be a good communicator. And adaptable and coachable.
Finally, among all the many other reasons web developers aren’t just web developers is the impact their work can have on the companies they work for, and maybe even the world. Each feature you built and every line of code can help solve a problem or bring someone closer to being connected. I am happy to know that already, in my short time as web developer, I have written code which will contribute to children around the world receiving a better education.
If you are interesting in learning more about Village Book Builders, you can find their site here.
