Bloc-Jams is a digital music player; a project where I got to utilize my coding skills while acquiring newer ones. One of the most challenging projects I’ve had to develop so far, even though I had experience in building websites on a much smaller scale, this project pushed me further and gave me no choice, but to grow.

Bloc-Jams was my first project in Bloc’s part-time Web developer’s curriculum, this was the next step after completing the frontend basic courses. My assignment was to create a full responsive, mobile friendly music player from start to finish.

The most difficult part of the project was the JavaScript section, I knew the syntax and how to write basic loops and functions, but I was really struggling to write solutions to the more complex problems. For the first time I would be introduced to DOM manipulation and jQuery, which were challenging feats of their own.

I would approach each problem with a basic internet search, I would look at snippets of code that might help and try to replicate the concepts in my project. I came to the realization that I hadn’t been experimenting with what I was learning in JavaScript, at this point I was just taking in information and not putting it into practice. If I was going to get through these problems, I needed to code and experiment in order to fully understand why some things worked and why some things didn’t.

This seem to work for me the best, I was gaining some confidence and really liked the results I was seeing. I was moving along with my project and was finally able to play and pause music and shuffle through songs. The jQuery part ended up being easier for me to digest, the syntax was really easy to read with less code to write.

In conclusion, by completing this project, I found out what worked for me as a developer. I’m still learning JavaScript and I still struggle with writing solutions, but I now have a better approach to how I solve each problem. I’m more realistic with the time it takes and with each problem is a series of tries that turn into failures, that eventually turns into a success. A success that wouldn’t be possible without trying.