I daughter is aroud 18 months and is learning new words every day, which is awesome. And with this project I had the idea to create an application that would allow me to record her speaking the words and keep track of when she learned them. And as she grows maybe allow additional recordings to keep track of the progress. I currently have the project at the point where I can start adding the recording and storing of sounds. I plan on doing this as a side project after the project assessment.
For my Rails final project review I was asked to add a search function to my site and write a blog post about it so here we go. My rails project was a web app that allows users to make friendly challenges to others and keep track of who won/lost and what the payment is. To achieve this I would need to add a search bar to the index view, make adjustments to the controller to handle the information sent by the form, and the model to create the logic needed to process the information.
For my Sinatra Project I decided to create a web application called “Write On”. Write On was inspired by the “Jam” concept, which is essentially a timed contest where users can submit projects based on the Jam’s theme and then get rated to see who created the best project. For “Write On” the projects will be short stories and users will be able to create, edit, and publish the stories on site and attach the story to a Jam. Users and guests will be able to browse through published stories, other users, and Jams. Only an ‘admin’ will be able to create, edit, and delete Jams, the admin will also be allowed to edit/delete users and their stories. Jams theme’s will be hidden until the opening date and Users will only be able to create stories for the Jam until it ends. Jams will only display published stories, any unfinished stories will only be visible by the User. Adding the rating system was a stretch goal for me that I did not reach, I plan on rebuilding this application later in Rails and will likely wait until then to add ratings.
The CLI project was a great experience for me and I am very happy with what I was able to accomplish. I also really liked that we had to start from scratch for the first time. Using bundler to install the gem setup and then setting up the environmental dependencies was nice as I had always ignored those files in previous labs and really needed the experience of creating them. It was also the first time I had to use github commands and create and manage a repo. And while I did not find the github commands very intuitive, I was able to get fairly comfortable commiting changes, creating branches, merging branches, and pushing changes to the repo. The other really big change for me was working without tests. I have gotten so used to using rspec –f-f and then fixing that it was strange to code without them. I ended up having to constantly remind myself to slow down and test new code as I went along. Eventually I started to form some new habits when coding, I now commit changes frequently and do most of my coding in a side branch until I get it working and merge it back into the master branch. I also am much better at following my own code as I would try to catch errors or places my code could break/exit before loading the gem and testing it out. Completing the CLI has left me feeling much better about what I have learned and much more confident that I can actually code moving forward.