Here I was thinking that the layout I had come up with was a good one and I couldn’t have been more wrong. I was overthinking what I wanted to accomplish. I was making the app more difficult for the user to use than I had originally intended.

I had a layout that I thought was good. After talking with an instructor, he showed me that I was over complicating it. The way I had my project laid out, the user would have gotten frustrated with all buttons they would have had to push.

Back to the drawing board I went, to revamp my capstone project. I scrapped most of what I had and started my layout all over. It had taken a few days and a lot of reworking what I wanted and talking to one of my beta testers to get a layout that finally made me happy.

I had coded the first page of the app from the old layout. Now that I had a new layout, I needed to rewrite that code. That’s when disaster struck. I was having a difficult time getting the first page to look like the new layout. The same instructor that had helped me suggested that I try Bootstrap. He took some time and quickly showed me how I could get through laying out my capstone project with Bootstrap by coding a small piece of it with me.

I had tried to code with Bootstrap for a few days and had become frustrated. It was taking me longer to do one page with Bootstrap than it would have with HTML and CSS. I was ready to throw in the towel on the whole Bootstrap approach.

During most of this process, we were starting to learn about databases in class. So now I was trying to code with this stupid Bootstrap nonsense and had to change gears and learn about the databases. I decided I need to step back and approach it a bit different. I needed to see how this would work step by step, in a way.

I got four pieces of white board and had my husband help me put one piece on the wall and left the other three pieces until I could decide where to put them. I took the white board and laid out my capstone step by step and the I took another piece and laid out my database.

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After I had laid these out it was easier for me to see how this would work and what functions I would be needing for my code. I went back to coding with Bootstrap and had become more frustrated because it took me almost a week to get one page coded. Again, I wanted to throw in the towel.

One of the teaching assistants offered to help me and show me Bootstrap could be used to my advantage. She spent about an hour and a half going over some of my code with me. She showed me how to use Bootstrap better. After spending time with her, I worked in some more pages for my capstone. I was able to get almost half of the pages for my capstone coded with that stupid Bootstrap (as I call it because I had such a hard time at first) and put myself in a good spot.

I am beginning to see my project come together. I think now I will start getting into the harder parts though and that is using some Javascript to get it to function properly and to get my server and database up and running. I may have a little less hair when this is done from all the stress but I would like it better if it was weight. So, thank you for sticking with me up to this point. Until my next disaster my friends.