Getting on track
This was the first project where I struggled and most of my struggles came from my concept. I had my idea picked out for the rails project early and thought I had a good grasp of what I wanted to do. I wanted to create an app that allowed people to make friendly wagers with each other and call it “Betsie” as a pun on “bet”. I still like the idea but when I started coding I quickly found out there were holes in my plan. After a few restarts and a lot of frustration I decided just to plow through with one of my tries and make it work. And despite not really liking my project all that much I did enjoy working in Rails.
What I like most about working in Rails is the controllers. I like the separation of concerns and the ability to easily pass helper methods and set before actions and do a bunch of little things to make the code cleaner and easier to understand.
My least favorite part of Rails is erb. While it is better than writing pure html it feels clunky to me. I do like the ability to genarate forms and use partials and having a layout page is cool. But ultimately I am hoping the javascript front end will replace erb.
For me the most important take away from the project is that I need lots of practice. Rails feels massive and will take multiple projects to begin to feel truly comfortable working with it. I have a couple of projects planned for when I have some free time although I may way until after Javascript because I am really looking forward to the next two modules.