Three phases later, at Flatiron School, I finally grasped what my day-to-day life as a front-end or back-end developer. Completing Phase 3 was very interesting to me on how much goes into giving the websites we visit daily their substance. Back-end development is for individuals who enjoy the "making things work" side of developing. A few examples are troubleshooting and debugging applications, the website's performance, and focusing on the database. While creating our project, it was mind-blowing to realize what goes into my favorite sites like Youtube, Twitch, and Hulu. Back-end developers are the cause of why our experience is so user-friendly and flawless.

Review.create(
      title: Faker::Lorem.sentence,
      rating: rand(1..10),
      hours: rand(10..200),
      review: Faker::Lorem.paragraph,
      game_id: game.id,
      gamer_id: gamer.id
    )

Above is an example of code from our project Game-a-holics. With this block of code, we used "Faker" to generate fake data

to appear as if we have a lot of activity on our website. Faker came in handy for saving us time creating individual random reviews for each game. Now, what does a block of code that allows an actual user to post their own review look like?

post '/reviews' do
    review = Review.create(
      title: params[:title],
      rating: params[:rating],
      hours: params[:hours],
      review: params[:review]
    )
    review.to_json
  end

Here this block of code allows the user to post their own review on an existing game on the site. When you get to see each step it takes to build the functions of the website. It makes you think how much code goes into finding your favorite episodes on your preferred streaming platform.

Working through the process and seeing it come together led me to focus on front-end development. Front-end is definitely for individuals who love the creative side of web developing. For most junior developers one of the biggest frustrations in front-end is CSS. With my little experience in CSS, it is one of the most fun and incredibly frustrating things to learn in front-end.

I spent the entire day trying to give our search bars a little style. Personally, it was fun because it allowed me to strengthen my creativity with this new skill I'm learning. Learning back-end quickly made me realize that front-end keeps me more engaged and motivated when going through the process.