I always loved cooking. Complete control of what I ate, and the potential to create incredible meals every day paints a romanticized view in anyone’s mind. But, just as my childhood hopes of playing Shortstop for the San Francisco Giants faded into oblivion, so did this misguided romanticization of the kitchen. Cooking, like cleaning my apartment or doing the laundry, turned more into a dreaded chore, than an exhilarating experience. Poor culinary knowledge, matched with absorbinantly high expectations perhaps exacerbated this hatred, but in truth, my lustful relationship with cooking was never meant to be.
Enrolled in the UC Berkeley Coding Bootcamp, I feared that product development carried similar romanticizations in my head. Yet, so far, I fail to find parallels. From the first minute of this project, when challenged to produce a fully fledged idea of what to create, I felt excitement, and working alongside two other wide-eyed and optimistic coders proved an incredibly enjoyable experience.
Was I a perfect coder? No. I wasted hours at a time helplessly solving problems that I unknowingly created, or with no idea how to answer. Sometimes I just stared at my computer, trying variations of the same solution, hoping a miracle might occur. But through these trials and tribulations, I never once felt my work useless, boring, or dreaded. Of course I didn’t enjoy my failures. Endless messages on terminal commanding me to fix merge errors I didn’t even know how to find. Or elements in CSS standing unchanged at each reload, my commands a conversation with a brick wall. Yet through it all, I carried inexplicable happiness.
Of course I did not complete this project alone. By my side stood two irreplaceable teammates. At each request for assistance, they reassured me that my snails pace was all part of the learning process. Our teamwork, and the collective effort put forward proved the backbone of this project. While presenting today, I couldn’t help but smile, as I felt washed with pride by our creation.
Is our app groundbreaking? No. Will it be used by millions across the world? Probably not. But it proves that hours of grueling work producing a product, surrounded by highly motivated teammates, carries the potential to be the love that cooking failed to be.
Curious at what we made? Check it out here: https://pdpco.github.io/jam-map/
Curious to see how this application was built, check out our github repository: https://github.com/PDPco/jam-map
Want more about our process? Read my teammates’ posts linked below!: