How to solve seemingly too difficult tasks?

Recently I applied for an internship in a pretty cool company and they gave me a task. 
I was tasked with building a simplified Twitter clone, without registration and a login.
I learned a lot from it but it think the most important lesson is when faced with a challenge that seems to difficult is to break it into small problems and solve those small tasks one by one.


First thing that came to my mind was that there was no way I can do any of this! I was required to use either MERN MEAN  stack for the mini app. I was in a bit of a dilemma on choosing  between React/Flux and AngularJS. I went with AngularJS since I took a few Angular tutorials before and haven't played around with React yet.


For the entire first day I just felt stuck and stupid so I didn't get any work done...
The next day I finally snapped out of it and started with some pseudo code.
I started with basic HTML layout and some basic CSS styling. The next road block was when I tried to make the tweets text to display after  input, after a few hours of googling around I figured it out with ng-repeat and learned a few things about controllers and scope along the way.



Next little thing was to get the profile picture and the name to display when a new tweet is posted, this part was easy. After that I needed to figure out a way how to have the total number of tweets increment by one whenever a new tweet is posted. This turned out easier that I had hoped (I have a tendency, and I'm working on eliminating it, to  look for the most complicated solutions first) eventually I posted a question on Stack Overflow, got a few down-votes but what matters is I got my answers. Turned out that I needed to adjust my scope and add tweets.length! 


The biggest achievement was figuring out how to display relative time on the tweets!
I still have to make cobble together something functional for the back end, but the moral of the story is that is that it is possible to solve problems that are a bit above your current abilities. 


The fake Twitter still needs a lot of polishing but I'm getting there!

Thanks for taking the time to read the post!



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