The final capstone project for Flatiron School that I built was a hybrid idea of a social media application that merged the ideas of twitter and snapchat. The high level overview of the application is that there is a user model and a post model which are referred to as “blerbs”. As a user, there is the ability to sign up for an account and log in to an existing account. The user can then view all of the current blerbs on the feed page and write blerbs of their own. Now the usage of the word current in the previous sentence is a bit different than that of say twitter and how twitter shows you the latest tweets upon logging in to your account. In this application, blerbs only appear on the screen for a certain amount of time, similar to snapchat. After the set amount of time has passed the application updates and only shows any blerbs that are still within the allotted time.
The magically feeling of joy one can get when you successfully accomplish the task of being able to have elements appear, disappear and re-appear on a page can be a great experience. But it can come with its share of challenges. In this blog post, we will explore a set of thoughts and approaches to solving such challenges.
As I was going through the rails module of the Flatiron School curriculum, building sideprojects and doing tutorials, I would always try to look through all of the files just to see what was going on inside of them. There was one file I would always come across and would wonder, “What is this for?”. That file was the concerns file in the controllers directory. Despite my curiousity being piqued, I didn’t get around to looking further into the matter until about the half way point of building out my rails project for Flatiron School.
Learning to code can be very challenging at times and yet early on in an application build or lab things can seem to go incredibly smooth and then walls are hit and bugs are born. In my experience it seems to happen to everyone at least once, myself included. For myself I found a few ways to help find where these creatures reside by pulling on my past experience as an audio engineer.
Ahhh Frank Sinatra…. no wait…. just Sinatra, the lightweight little brother to Ruby on Rails. To say I was excited to get an application onto the web would be an extreme understatement. From the beginning and throughout the majority of the Sinatra lesson curriculum I felt rather comfortable with how everything was coming and working together, almost to the point to where I became concerned that it couldn’t be such a smooth consumption of knowledge. To my amazement this feeling was reinforced through out the majority of the labs but sure enough walls were hit.