Yay me! I just finished up the front end portion of my MyKadima Rails application, and I feel great. More than the past projects, I went into this one feeling pretty lost about jQuery, Javascript, APIs, and what I was doing. I missed Rails, and wondered “Why am I writing all of this code just to save a few seconds on a page reload?”. Honestly, I can’t say that I’m a convert, but I definitely understand these topics A LOT more than I did going in. First, I want to explain a few hang ups I had during this project, and then I have a few upgrades I want to share, if only to remember how I can grow!
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.
I just decided to call my Sinatra app done even though I have a million more ideas to make it better. That’s the hard thing about these portfolio projects - I see amazing web applications every day, and I’m so excited to build something useful that I can share with others, but I’m not there yet! Yes, I could spend many more days adding new features and styling to my project, but it is probably time better spent moving forward.
To put it lightly, I was a little overwhelmed when I first started this lab. I think it was the lack of tests to run. I love the tests. They tell me exactly what my program needs to do and I can take it one step at a time. Without that, I didn’t know where to start! “Start by writing tests”, you say. Touche - I didn’t write any tests because I was anxious to jump in and feel like I was making progress. This probably wasn’t the best method, but thanks to the resources attached to the lab, it didn’t go totally awry.
As you may remember from my last blog post ;), I recently tried to make a personal website as my first solo web project. I feel good about my progress, but it is not done yet because I’ve been deep in OO Ruby world. While building my personal site, I first tried to building it all from scratch, but I changed my mind early on and switched to a Bootstrap framework. After doing a little more research, here are some pros and cons I’ve found about using Bootstrap that may be able to help you decide which path to take in the future. (This is not an exhaustive list - I’m sure I will find more pros and cons as I create more websites!)