I am finally calling my Rails project finished! For now. It has taken far longer than I expected, and lead to way too much procrastination. When I started thinking about my Rails final, I had a big choice to make - Do I make an app similar to the lessons OR do I try to make one of the many app ideas me and my boyfriend have brainstormed during my time at Learn? I decided to go with the latter, which has been more fulfilling, but also more frustrating and time consuming.
The idea for this app came up one day when we were hunting for a place to kill some time and play Kadima on a rainy day in Atlanta. (For those that don’t know, Kadima is a simple beach paddle ball game that we play one-on-one or with a group.) “Man, it would be great if we could find an indoor place to play - there should be an app for that!” I frequent sentence ending of the last few months. After spitballing a few other necessary features of a Kadima app, I realized - I can probably make this one! Or at least build a decent beginning.
Having built something a little different than the lessons, I feel more confident in my ability to plan an app’s models and relationships from scratch. I learned a lot about Omniauth. I could not have figured this out without the help of the Learn community. I also learned a lot about forms, and managed to pick up a new tool with datalist. This allowed me to include an autocomplete form field that would also let a user create a new object if needed. I’m going to write a blog post just on using this with rails.
I have so much to add to MyKadima in the future! I’m going to make a quick list here (mostly to help my own memory):
- Add filtering ability to locations and games index.
- Add javascript functionality for table row links
- Add maps feature for locations.
- Add Friends type capability.
- Add ability to include non-users as game partners.
- Add photos.
Ideally, this could turn into a pick-up sports type community, so people could come together and play! It’s nice to feel like I can finally conceptualize and build some of the ideas I’ve had for helpful apps, and I’m just at the tip of the knowledge iceberg.
Here’s my brother, crushing at Christmas Kadima!
