At the top of every new year, at least most of us like to start fresh. Planning of new goals, ditching old habits and keeping track of new ones in order to improve a newer version of yourself. Writing these goals down can sometimes be a little overwhelming especially when you’re staring down at that blank sheet of paper not knowing where to start. Sometimes you just need a little guidance to get your mind flowing in the most important areas that needs the focus. And of course, nothing sucks more than when you finally have your important thoughts written down and that paper is either lost somewhere in a sea of notebooks to never be revisited again. The bonus is the convenience of an application where everything is stored all in one place.
The idea of Guided Journal came from this struggle. Guided Journal is a single page application built with a Rails API backend and a modular JavaScript frontend. You can choose your journal category type for any given entry with guided prompts, that way you dont have to think about what to write about on a given day, but still keep on track with your goals, habits, or just recording your daily life.
The most challenging part of this project was being able to fully understand the inner workings of Javascript and how to apply it to this project. I struggled ALOT, especially in the beginning with using serializers. Fast JSON API is what was used in the backend to help structure my data. There can be tons of nesting going on with your data and really understanding how your data is structured is super important for when it is time to call your data in the front end. Also understanding how to use Fetch to communicate between the backend and frontend was challenging. Learning JS will be continuous for me and it is indeed a very powerful programming language for the web. I was also able to use external resources in addition to Learn such as MDN, YouTube, Udemy, and Front End Masters to take an even deeper dive into concepts that I just could not wrap my head around. All of these resources helped tremendously!
Link to github repo: Guided Journal API + Guided Journal Frontend ❤️