Learning App Development 🤩🖥️

As a product manager, I understand the critical role that effective collaboration between the PM and engineering team plays in the success of a product. Having worked as a developer early on in my career and then transitioning into various product roles over the past five years, I know the importance of having a solid technical foundation.

While I have a basic understanding of front and backend languages, using the command line interface, and collaborating on GitHub, during my time as a developer, I felt like I was missing a ton of context and struggled to fully grasp the why behind what I was doing. Despite spending eight months on a full-stack team at GE Healthcare, I found myself drowning in what I didn't know and couldn't wait to move on to my next rotation in product management.

Now, in the middle of my second year of an MBA program, I decided to use my second year to improve my programming skills. I recently completed an Application Development course, and I am currently self-pacing through an Advanced AppDev course taught by Professor Raghu Betina at The University of Chicago.

The first course was exactly what I was looking for, as it provided me with the foundational knowledge and skills to build an app from scratch, something I had struggled to understand even after completing multiple coding language courses on Code Academy. One of our first assignments is to write about what we're learning - so here I am :).

Here's what I learned this week:

RESTful APIs - what they are and why/how to use them
Helper Methods, such as form_with, link_to, label_tag, button_tag, and more
How to refactor our code for simplicity - during AppDev 1, we learned the building blocks of Ruby - creating routes from scratch, manually building CRUD actions, our view templates, and so on.
Ruby scaffold command - wow, I can use one line of code to do everything I had just spent nine weeks learning how to do manually 🤩

Looking forward to continuing the journey 🌴.