Image source: Nicole Wolf Unsplash

My Frontend Journey- The final piece

Yes, this is the final part of the series. I hope you all have enjoyed following the journey so far.

Now back to real tension. It was time to choose our capstone project. We were given 10 options to pick from, but if you wanted to build something outside that list, you had to inform the mentors and get approval first. I decided to choose from the provided list because of the timeline and the fact that the mentors were already stretched thin i didn’t want to take that risk.

I chose to build a Travel Planner. The idea appealed to me because the design possibilities felt endless. It was something I could continue to grow and improve on even after submission.

We were given 5 weeks to work on the project, starting from idea development, planning what features we needed, sketching the layout for both web and mobile versions, and outlining the core components and user experience.

The Design Phase

This stage involved designing the landing page, main dashboard, forms, search features, and ensuring everything remained usable and intuitive. I used Figma for the UI designs.

A Screenshot of My High-Fidelity Design web version

The Coding Begins 🥲

For this phase, I used both what I had learned and AI (I’ll write another post about coding with AI) to help debug and fill knowledge gaps. Writing custom code was a challenge. I stalled at first by just setting up GitHub, React, Tailwind CSS, the TripAdvisor API, Amadeus API, and OpenWeather API.

I struggled with figuring out where to get authentication keys. Then Tailwind refused to show up in my terminal after installation. Only to discover it was inside the components folder instead of the root. Deep sigh.

The deadline was approaching, and somehow the zeal kicked in. I began coding for at least 3 hours daily after work and longer on weekends. I wanted a strong commit history and I wanted to submit on the first deadline.

We still had lessons and assignments during the first 3 weeks of the capstone period, then weeks 4 and 5 were fully dedicated to completing the project.

The Final Push

The Saturday before submission, I spent the entire day polishing the site. I could not fix all the bugs dancing across my pages, but I made sure the user flow was smooth. I sent it to a few friends (both technical and non-technical) for feedback. Their reviews were encouraging, and their corrections were helpful.

Responsiveness was my biggest challenge. The search section behaved differently on smaller screens in portrait mode. I mentioned it in the Loom presentation video because yes, they encourage us to show bugs too. Lol.

Submission…

Yes, you guessed right. I lost weight again the moment I uploaded my links to GitHub, Netlify, and Loom. Once I submitted, I treated myself to one of my favorite snacks. I strongly believe in celebrating your wins, no matter how small. You achieved something you have been meaning to do. That is amazing.

Then I waited again for review. Once the grace week for late submissions was over, reviews started. On the Friday of the reviews, I received an email saying I passed with flying colors.

Your girl got 100% on her project. Whoop whoop!

Link to my CapStone Project: https://alxproject-travelplanner.netlify.app/

My overall score, yes 0.15% is missing and i don’t know who ate it.🙄

Gratitude

If I had the opportunity to give a speech during graduation last Friday, I would have said this:

A big thank you to my friends who kept pushing me to stay consistent. Those who checked my code, gave advice, or simply cheered me on when my checker kept turning red. My best girl was “shouting Go green to the checker in the background” while I was troubleshooting. That one still makes me laugh.

Thank you to everyone, and thank you to ALX for the opportunity to learn and grow. It was an amazing journey, and I am truly glad I saw it through to the end.