Back in grade school, I used to swim for both a club swimming team and my local high school swim team. I remember being put through rigorous training to become a competitive swimmer, often challenging my audacity and sanity along the way. For the past few weeks, learning the basics of Meteor reminded me of those swimming days, in both the intensity and the number of headaches I have received thus. But, there was one other aspect of swimming that I noticed shared closely with Meteor development.
You are probably wondering what swimming has in common with using Meteor. To swim any stroke, a person must use their arms, legs, hips, and other parts of their body at the same time. Only with a precisely coordinated movement of a person’s whole body are they able to move effectively through the water. The result of a good swimmer using their entire body to propel themselves forward in the water is a look of effortless fluidity.
Meteor essentially relies on the same principle. To make a beautiful and functional web application, Meteor demands that its developers use multiple programming tools at the same time. Javascript, Semantic-UI, HTML, ESLint, and MongoDB must all be used in a coordinated and orchestrated fashion with Meteor to create a quality web application. And, of course, if the developer is lacking in any one of these programming skills, the results are immediate and affect not just the part of the application where the skill is applied, but the application as a whole.
Speaking of as a whole, during the past few weeks I’ve taken basically a crash course in Meteor development and managed to keep myself from drowning. Much of it involved closely following the tutorials of my professor and simply mirroring his actions on my own computer. I was never a fan of this type of learning because it feels as if I don’t own the solution once I complete a tutorial. In the worst case, I feel as if I would forget the information given in the tutorial shortly after having watched it.
No matter how this method of learning Meteor made me feel, I deeply appreciate the tutorials my professor made and had us use to learn the basics of Meteor. To overcome my feeling of not owning the result of following the tutorial, I simply repeated the tutorial multiple times. As I repeated a tutorial again and again, I gained a deeper understanding of what was being done and felt confident in my ability to replicate the idea and meaning behind the code being implemented. The tutorials were well executed and gave me a breakdown of the essential skills needed to make web applications work while briefly covering what Meteor handles automatically to make web development easier.
Overall, Meteor is a sophisticated and modern tool for web application development. Its ability to run its applications in real-time due to being implemented entirely in Javascript allows it to bypass the AJAX solution of traditional web application development platforms. It’s tuned for beginners like myself and is evolving rapidly in the effort to support the demands of the ever-shifting field of web development. I feel proud to have started learning web development using Meteor and can’t wait to make my own streak in the night sky.