This is an update to my Chingu Speedrun Challenge. If you don’t know what the hell I’m talking about, it’s explained here.
The Speedrun Challenge is all about repetition and iteration so that something new becomes second nature. This post covers the second project, the Quotes app, which should be the first of several projects that will focus on making and handling API calls in Angular.
I’m off to a slower start than expected in my Speedrun for two reasons. Actually three reasons, but I don’t plan on ‘fixing’ time spent taking my kids to baseball and football, I’ll just have to work around that…
The two causes for the slow start that I can address are A) being overly nit picky about the design of each project (Tribute Page) and B) diving down deep rabbit holes (Quote Project).
Hold off on Design until the End
The first issue (design) I plan on addressing by not styling any of my projects until the end. I’ll focus instead on getting as many functional apps built as possible. At the end, I will style the collection of apps as a whole as much as possible before addressing them individually.
Each project will have a minimum level of styling that is essential to the functionality of the app. I will attempt to keep the styling to the level of functionality and not get stuck in the weeds on the little things.
Avoid Rabbit Holes
The second issue (rabbit holes) will be harder to fix.
While I was building out the Quotes App, I got stuck focusing on how to cast an observable to a custom type. I had a working API call fairly quickly, using the https://talaikis.com/api/quotes API (this API returns 100 quotes so I could limit the HTTP calls).
It’s my nature, however, to dig deeper when I don’t fully understand something. Here, I was having a hard time understanding the best practice in Angular for taking the Observable that is returned from the HTTP call and converting it to a custom type.
This led me down a rabbit hole looking into observables, classes, interfaces, reading more on Typescript, etc, etc.. While this was definitely helpful, and I learned quite a bit, I have to keep in mind that the Speedrun is mostly about tackling as many projects as possible.
Moving forward, I’ll try to make a conscious effort to limit my research to gaining a working knowledge of a topic, then move on. This will be difficult, as I have a habit of digging deep into topics that I don’t completely understand. For these instances, I’ll keep a list of topics to research further after the Speedrun ends.
You can find the code for the Quotes App here. I’ll be working on the Local Weather App next.