Caution Meteor Sited
20 Oct 2016
It wiped out the dinosaurs, what would it do to software engineers?
Starting the Meteor module in this software engineering course, I had some pretty high expectations. I had heard that Meteor would be an easy to follow web application framework which would reduce time spent coding. It definitely helps organize and reduce code size, but Meteor is also really, really slow.
How slow is it..?
Five minutes for the initial startup and around one to two minutes just to refresh a page. That’s right, it takes two minutes to refresh a single page. In other words, adding a single semicolon in any part of your code to fix a critical error will take up to two minutes just to verify that you’ve made the changes. This latency period has had disastrous effects on my WOD times, as I can be quite careless in my coding.
BUT-!
On the bright side, all this time waiting for Meteor to compile has given me extra time to review my code for additional errors and to understand what exactly each piece of the code was doing. I often find myself “google-ing” tutorials on using things like FlowRouter, Semantic UI, etc. which helps to bolster my knowledge in general. Normally, I might be inclined to open my cellphone or play some games while I wait, but the loading times are oddly just long enough to make me want to work on something else, but short enough so that I don’t feel the need to slack off.
How well did I do?
Over the course of this module, I was tasked with working on the “Digits” WODs. Since they were supposed to be my first real experience with Meteor, most of the work involved watching Professor Johnson code, and then copying him in order to try and code something similar. For the first Digits exercise, I spent around two hours(DNF) trying to create the homepage as the professor had done it, and had neglected to redo the WOD for a better time because I thought it would be too much work. I followed a similar pattern throughout the rest of the Digits exercises, always ending up in the DNF territory. Yet, once I had completed the entire Digits series, I quickly went back and redid every single section around three times each, until I was able to do every single exercise in under ten minutes each. It all paid off when the quiz WOD came around and right from the start, I knew exactly what to do without even reading the instructions(though I did read them, of course!). I was able to finish in Rx time for the first time since the first WOD of the semester.