For my final project at Flatiron school I made an online database for web influencers/content creators. In addition to requirements listed in the curriculum it was very important to have the ability for a user to upload photos. In my head this sounded like an easy feature to add, ultimately it was but I ran into a few issues that I would like to share in the hope it might help others as they venture into this task.
In the 4th project for Flatiron school we are required to add JavaScript to a Rails project that was made previously. Or more specifically the requirement was primarily change a Rails app to incorporate the use of JavaScript to load data asynchronously on various loaded view page. I am not sure how other Flatrion students felt but this whole process was extremely challenging for me. Learning that programing means to improve upon something that you have already built seems like a simple concept. However, breaking and rebuilding something that already worked was a real struggle. I used several techniques to get on through this project. The highlights were using the Pomodoro technique. This basically means that I set 25 minutes timers and did the whole product in many of 25-minute chunks. From these chunks I was able to stop procrastinating and little by little accomplish the task. I also never fully grasped all the elements of JavaScript, for this I spent a lot of time googling, reading the MDN web docs, and eventually found myself going through the Codecademy course on JavaScript. The last l technique I wan to mention was to go through other Flatiron students code on Github to see how they made these changes. I hope those suggestions can help someone else out because those 3 items are what finally got me to the point where I can submit my project( Hooray!). That being said, I want to highlight a few of the challenges in the code and how I wrote the code to meet all of Flatirons requirements.
I wanted to create an app that was useful for myself and hopefully also be useful for others. I’ve been working in supply chain for several years and big box retailers (basically any store with multiple locations) all have very specific rules in how product gets shipped in. Rules vary from carton size, to asn details, to how early a delivery request has to made, and the list goes on and on. The app I created is a way to keep track of all these various requirements in a way that accessible for anyone and creates a community where people can come to hopefully get their questions answered.
With a successful passing of the CLI gem project I was ready and eager to get started on the Sinatra section. With excitement I open up the first SQLite lesson and soon my excitement begins to fade as I learn I’m about to make digital spread sheets, a lot of them. Now, I’m not downplaying the importance to ways to store data, in fact this blog post is ultimately going to praise the ability to store data, I’m just simply stating that the switch from OO Ruby to SQLite to me felt a little, well……boring.