As I work through project week, I find myself feeling a sense of pride. All of a sudden rails began clicking for me. I’ve learned to embrace errors and not fear them. Becoming friends with ‘byebug’ instead of it being an after thought. How to read the errors and google tirelessly for the answer and to not be afraid to keep trying.
At first I doubted myself. I had grand ideas of building a site based on the movie, ‘Jurassic World’, where a user can purchase a ticket to view live dinosaurs and see various attractions. How a user could leave one review for each attraction and be allowed to edit them and delete them, so I could showcase my knowledge of the CRUD process. The big thing I wanted was a user to fill out a job application, that would allow them to fill out an address and they can be hired to feed and water dinosaurs. The dinosaurs would have an dynamic moodlets based on how often they are fed.
I started the week off, by googling how to build my app. How do I get the gems I need to get started. What magic code worked like Corneal in Sinatra that would build out everything I need, rails new, was my answer. Once that was figured out. I focused on getting my routing to work, made sure I navigated successfully to each view before I built anything out. I made sure to follow seperation of concern. Creating and generate the controllers that would keep my model organized.
The hardest part was getting nesting routes correct and applying the right relationships between my models. I understand the concept, as I use SQL daily at my current job, but still havent’ quite masted it when it comes to rails. I made sure I had my one to many relationship, many to many relationship, nested forms, and records saving as they should. I created my own data for dinosaurs, attractions, and zoos to prevent too much time on finding an API that worked for what I was trying to accomplish.
I learned from my mistakes. I commited my changes more often than before, leaving meaningful notes. I hacked, hacked, and hacked my website to ensure security and my authenticity is good. Every time I tried to demo it to others, BAM!, another error and back to the drawing board, but every day I grew closer to completion. I’m both nervous and excited to see what happens next..