Meteor is Out of This World
16 Oct 2016
Where am I?
After spending about 7 weeks learning about JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and Semantic UI, I thought learning Meteor was going to be a smooth ride. I was terribly mistaken. The ride so far seems more like launching into space at what seems like the speed of light. Lots of concepts are flying past me and I have no idea what’s going on. Thankfully, the rocket is running out of fuel and things are slowing down. I’m finally getting an understanding of how Meteor works.
Where Did This Mess Come From?
You’d think that, being in space, there would be very few obstacles to overcome. I was wrong yet again. In the learning process, I used template code to model applications after. There’s one big caveat to it: CONSISTENCY. While coding, changes need to be made to reflect the meaning of objects and variables. However, if you happen to leave a name unchanged somewhere, Meteor WILL call you on it. The code needs to be 100% consistent with correct syntax in order to satisfy Meteor.
Starting to Cruise
After working with Meteor for a couple weeks doing both tutorials and a simple web page, everything is starting to make sense. Getting through the initial learning curve lets me realize that Meteor really is great. Meteor provides a lot of useful features like user authentication and databases to store information. These two features alone make life so much easier for developers since they don’t need to implement their own method of user authentication or manage a database for user data. Meteor does all of this behind the scenes. The best part is that Meteor makes a lot of these features easy to implement with just a few lines of code. While Meteor might take awhile to learn, it’s definitely worth it.
Final Thoughts
Meteor has proved to be stressful at first, especially learning how the organization of files works. However, once the initial learning is done and you finally start developing, Meteor provides lots of great features and behaviors that give webpages reactivity and allows you to easily follow templates. Slowly but surely, Meteor is becoming yet another tool in my repertoire that I wish I learned about sooner.