The creation of a one’s first gem is an intimidating, confusing, stressful and completely fullfilling milestone for a software engineer in training. At first, the idea of a project is a bit overwhelming and the best way to deal with being overwhelmed is to break it into parts. Thus, it is time to begin creating a gem.
Here comes the first challenge: how and where to build a gem. Prior to this project, the path has been very clear, enter the IDE and then pass the test. The project lesson page does not have a sandbox to immediately work out of, so this already can make one feel a bit lost. In addition, the lesson page refers to videos to create a gem and those videos are located outside of the lesson; to leave the lesson page to complete the lesson is a foreign feeling in itself. There are videos that will help figure these challenges out and asking for help at this stage is reccomended to get the ball rolling.
After finally creating the gem, everything becomes more familiar. The main difference at this stage is that there is no rspec so there is also nothing to test. Thus, one must have a decent understanding of pry to work through things. This is also the fun part that gives a rewarding feeling, methods working they way intended, troubleshooting and breaking through moments of being stuck. Is this what being a software engineer feels like? Spending hours and hours to create something from nothing.
Things to know before starting:
- How to create a gem and the beginning contents
- How to connect seperate files so the interact with one another
- How to test using pry
- How to commit the gem (save the gem)