Dun dun dun… the rails project is here, a moment of pride and anxiety. First thing first, read the directions and PLAN. Typically, I am wing it and improvise kind of guy. I tried to do that with this rails project.. I also restarted the rails project a couple times. However, messing up and restarting comes with a few lessons that I am glad to have learned.
A few lessons learned by restarting:
- Sometimes repitition is the best way to learn. The Flatiron curriculim is great at introducing many of the forms, generators and migrations that will be used. The project is where to apply these and get the muscle memory for them. In addition, the project alows you to get the ability to tell yourself, “this looks a bit weird”.
- Read the directions… I might have mapped out my join tables strangely
- “rails c -s” is a great way to test if your models are working out properly.
- When there is an issue on the rails server, there is a small terminal that pops up that can be used to test things out.
After restarting and actually planning things out, everything went much smoother… until it didn’t. Following some lessons or live coding from instructors is helpful and many of their practices can be emulated and applied. However, what they do will not always work for your project. This is to be expected, as you are not just copying their code and putting a different name on it. At that point, you are alone to code your way. This is the fun part; instead of asking yourself what you need to do, you get to problem solve and dive into issues that you did not even know where issues, like “why are there random brackets on this?” This part being fun made was a good sign to me.
Now, I am done, but I’m really not done. There will always be a way to make code better; I can add more styling, there can be more features, my code could be dryer. This is a feeling that I believe everyone will have; this project is focused on rails and basic functions. I had this similar feeling during the sinatra project and I can probably do that project with three scaffolds and a join table. Knowing that, I feel that these projects are meant to be teachers and points of reflection. This project took longer than any other and am glad to see everything working.