= akm_case_study
This case study is the culmination of my participation in TEKsystem's Cohort 5 Java Full Stack Developer Bootcamp. Below I will discuss the challenges I encountered in coding this project and how I overcame them. Because this capstone was started approximately midway through the bootcamp, many of the features it has now (most of them) were not learned until later. The approach was to do what you can, and improve upon it as you go.
= Challenge 1 The first challenge I faced was dealing the feeling of wanting to do everything right away. We had not learned about the Spring framework yet, and it felt as if the entire project was nothing but Spring. This was daunting. I overcame this by not giving up, and reading and learning as much as possible both during class and after class. I learned that implementation is gradual and not instant. You don't sit down and create a fullstack application in 1 hour with all its bells and whistles. It takes time and you will run into unexpected exceptions, errors, and your code not doing what you want it to.
= Challenge 2 The second challenge I faced was dealing with exceptions and errors. I ran into a lot of exceptions and errors while I was learning Hibernate (an API abstraction and implementation of JDBC). This was when I first linked my Java to my SQL database. It was both an exciting time and a frustrating one when things did not go as planned. Like challenge 1, by not giving up, reading, learning, and asking many questions, I gradually came to understand Hibernate's processes. Although there is still so much to learn, as always!
= Challenge 3 The third challenge I faced was dealing with my code not doing what I wanted it to do. This often occurred simultaneously with a lack of knowing how to accomplish what I wanted to do. The way I navigated this was to again, not give up, read, ask questions, and stop to visualize what I want my application to look like/do.
= To be more specific To be more specific, SQL joins were initially difficult for me but after much practice they started to make a lot of sense. Spring Security was also fairly daunting because there were so many methods that I was not familiar with. However, I am now more comfortable with security methods such as .antMatchers().