First of all, I can’t believe I am done with my Sinatra Project. It was an amazing experience building this app. So this is my second project and I thought it would be a little easier since I have some prior experience on CLI project but I was wrong. LOL. The Sinatra project was completely different from what I thought it would be. It’s different but in a good way. The biggest difference between CLI and SINATRA is DISPLAY of what we build. In CLI, we can see all our codes, but only in our terminal in plain text. Not so interesting right? Whereas, in Sinatra, we get to see our work in-browser with all beautiful texts, images, designs etc., which was really cool and very interesting to me. I could just feel that I was getting closer to achieving my goal.
Naming My Project The first thing I learned was choosing the topic of a project really makes a difference on how you build your app? If we choose to build something which is close to our heart or which we are really interested in, the process of building an app will be full of excitement and fun. You will put every effort to make it happen. As a Nail Tech and Esthetician for over 8 years, I’m very much interested in building an app for nail salon or full spa. Through the Sinatra project, I did a part of it, which was a very happy moment for me.
The Project Requirements Going through all of the project requirements was another important thing. Not paying attention to the requirements could create a lot of confusion and you could end up doing something else. I had some confusion as well but thank god we have Cohort Lead, who makes sure we understand everything before we begin to build our app. Still I suggested that everyone read the requirements over and over until they were confident that they understood every single line.
Bonus Lessons In The Curriculum By not taking bonus lessons seriously, I think I made a mistake. Sometimes you should just do what you have to do even if other people tell you it’s not necessary. Since I was so busy with all the lessons and labs every week and we had deadlines I skipped all Bonus lessons, but during the project, I realized there were a lot of things I was missing. There were so many new words or methods I didn’t know about because they were part of Bonus lessons which I never completed. Later, I was researching like crazy. Why didn’t I know about these things? One thing was sure, the information was in the curriculum if it was going to be a requirement of the project. So after much research, I found out that they were all in bonus lessons. So I encourage everyone to go through bonus lessons as well.
My Resources I think resources are a very powerful tool to be a successful developer. You can’t remember everything you learn and that’s why you need to know how to find resources when needed. Of course, Google search is developer’s best friend and you can find almost every solution there if you know how to look for it. So, be very specific when you are trying to find a particular resource. Here are a few resources that were very helpful to me for this project:
- https://github.com/thebrianemory/corneal
- https://edgeguides.rubyonrails.org/active_record_validations.html#validations-overview
- https://www.w3schools.com/html/html_css.asp
These are the main topics I wanted to highlight. Beside those, I learned about MVC which stands for models, views, controllers. Models handle ruby logic, controllers handle HTTP requests and connect to our models, and views either take in or display data to our users. Also, the active record is very powerful, which is basically logic behind the model. It
- Represents models and their data.
- Represents associations between these models.
- Represents inheritance hierarchies through related models.
- Validates models before they get persisted to the database.
- Performs database operations in an object-oriented fashion.
And at last, how can I forget about Html and CSS? Html helped to create beautiful forms and CSS did all the wonder to make this app look pretty by adding images in the proper place and giving background colors and effects. Overall, I had so much fun building this app. Eagerly, waiting for the next Project.
Thank you