Meteor, to me, is a new framework. Like all frameworks, getting used to and mastering them takes a lot of time, all the more so if one is also dealing with the frantic minded-ness of also dealing with a language they haven’t used for a few years. Getting used to the language and preferred style while learning the framework is a feet that is not only difficult, but also comes with a few technical challenges.
Unfortunately problems began for me at installation where it became visible only after I started trying to interact with MongoDB that’s associated with Meteor. The problem that popped up threw an exception whenever I attempted to do anything with Mongo. The error’s description displayed a filename that was associated with Meteor’s framework, which at first made me think that there was something wrong with my installation, or, perhaps, that my meteor npm install failed for some reason. With that misconception, I was sent on a spiral of trials and errors of creating new meteor apps, reinstalling/manually updating meteor, reinstalling nodejs, and so on.
The fix, was actually much less about the installation of or lack of updated apps. It was actually much simpler and I frankly do not know why this fixes anything. At first, the defualt .js file association was with Windows, and switching that default association to IntelliJ fixed the problem. I want to assume that if I had changed the association to anything but Windows the execution would have worked flawlessly because it was trying to open the file as a text file rather than a .js file, but I cannot be too sure about it.
This is much less a Meteor problem than it is a personal laptop issue, but I first became aware of how terrible my laptop was actually holding up because of Meteor. I was able to install everything fine for my desktop computer I have at home despite it being roughly the same age as my laptop; a few years old, just with a lot less abuse and more maintenance. In any case, I’ve known for a while that my laptop’s harddrive was getting slower to the point where it’d only do reads and writes at a few MB/s before reaching 100% disk use and begin stressing out with the fans. I figured that would be fine, considering programming doesn’t require that much use unless I’m about to compile a huge project.
And guess what meteor is (so far)? A small project in the context of what I wrote, but a huge project because of the framework that builds everything. The result of this oversight was the unfortunate discovery that it would take me about 15 minutes to make a meteor project. In the mean time, it’d also render my laptop fairly unstable, even though physically it has good specs (i7-4810MQ, 16gb RAM, and a dedicated graphics card though that’s not too relevant here). On the attempt to defrag- my first defrag in the 3 or 4 years that I’ve had this laptop- to hopefully mend my issues, I’ve encountered only more problems. The first, being that it would not defrag my laptop. It took almost zero seconds for a process that should take a while.
My solution was simple: go on Amazon, get a laptop using priority shipping, and pray it doesn’t get delayed by Tuesday. And that’s what I’ve done. This laptop has an SSD, a good processor though not as good as my old one, and again, a dedicated graphics card that has no relevance here (or yet).