Code, Chaos, and the Curve of Learning

"Code, Chaos, and the Curve of Learning"

This week was a juggling act—part system administrator, part developer-in-training, and part helpdesk hero. Between handling user management tasks, doing a bit of data entry, and taking the occasional “My printer won’t print!” call, we somehow squeezed in time to dive headfirst into system development.

Our project lead, Ma’am Ynah, gave us a bit of a breather by allowing us to take on one module at a time. I chose to begin with the User Management Module—and oh boy, did the real learning begin from there.

Enter: Vue.js.

Now, Vue wasn’t completely foreign to me, but working with it in a real-world setting felt like switching from driving a tricycle to piloting a spaceship. The coding style was different, not quite like what we learned in university. But that’s what made it exciting.

Instead of the all-in-one tangle of frontend and backend code we were used to, this was modular. Clean. Logical. The frontend was separate, the backend talked through APIs, and the result was a surprisingly more efficient debugging process. I found myself liking this new approach—it made me see coding not just as a task but as architecture.

Of course, that doesn’t mean it was smooth sailing. With new frameworks come new errors, and with errors come hours of debugging. My screen became a gallery of red text and cryptic messages. Sometimes it felt like fighting a hydra—solve one bug, and two more would appear. But hey, progress is progress.

We also got our repository set up, committing our baby steps into Git like proud parents documenting a toddler’s first words. Joseph and I began task designations—he handled one part, I handled another, and we slowly carved out the bones of the system.

But here’s something that really stood out this week: developing in a non-IT-centered environment is a whole different beast. The system requirements? Vague. The user needs? Broad. It’s not that people didn’t care—it’s just that tech isn’t their world. And that made it our job to explore, interpret, and sometimes even guess what the system really needed to do.

This week was a learning curve, a sharp one—but it felt right. It felt real. It was frustrating, satisfying, confusing, and exciting all at once. And if there’s one thing I’m taking away from it, it’s this:

In industries where tech isn’t the heart, developers become the translators. The explorers. The builders of systems people didn’t know they needed—until it worked.

And we're on our way to building just that. One bug, one breakthrough at a time.

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