After what seemed like forever, I finally managed to finish my Pomodoro Clock project that I’ve been working on as part of the freeCodeCamp curriculum.

The Pomodoro technique involves two blocks of time. The first one, usually 25 minutes is dedicated to work, and the second, shorter block of time (usually five minutes) is rest or play time.

freeCodeCamp lists certain requirements for each projects, calling them ‘user stories’ that you have to fulfil. For the Pomodoro project the requirements were:

• the ability to start a 25 minute timer that would go off when twenty five minutes had passed
• the ability to reset the clock
• and the ability to change the length of the timer

I had a look at pretty much as many examples as I could find to see how others had tackled the project- not looking at the code, but because I hadn’t used the Pomodoro technique before, I wanted to see it in action! Once I felt like I had a pretty good idea of what I wanted to create I went to work researching timers, and the different ways people wrote javascipt timers.

Check out my Pomodoro Timer here.

I had a lot of trouble with this, and the biggest hurdle for me was figuring out how the different functions needed to fit together. Figuring how to write the code for a countdown timer wasn’t too difficult, but I found making the different functions to pause or reset the timer more challenging.

I would say that another large issue that I had with this project was that I’d decided to write the code with vanilla JavaScript. A lot of examples or code explanations that I looked at when working on this project were written in jQuery. I’m thinking about using jQuery for my next project- I think it’s probably time to get more familiar with it.

I appreciate minimalist design, but I think the design of my Pomodoro Clock is a bit boring. I’ve decided to use Bootstrap for my next project, to give me a bit of a head start on the design front.

Onwards and upwards, right?