It is hard to believe that I am here, I have finally made it to the end of my journey with Flatiron! For this project, I wanted to do something fun that would be useful to most age groups! So, I created an informational app about the different biomes and the animals and plants that live in those biomes!
The world has been an interesting place lately. The adventure I have had at Flatiron so far, is nothing short of chaotic. I started school in December and everything was rolling pretty smoothly until about February. As we all know, February was when the Coronavirus officially hit and we were living near Denver, Co. We were a travelling family and went across the US from jobsite to jobsite but our home base has always been in Oklahoma. So, when we heard that everything was starting to shut down, we decided to move back to Oklahoma to be near family, friends, and our home during the pandemic. When we came back to Oklahoma we made the big decision to stop traveling, buy a home, and settle back down. So, during the pandemic, while everything was shut down, we found, purchased, and moved into our new home. That was a feat in and of itself! I am also a stay-at-home mother of three children, whom I homeschool by choice, and then I have my school (Flatiron School).
Module 3 was a bumpy road for me. As you all know, we are living through a pandemic, and in many ways it has changed my life as I knew it! Before, we were a travelling family, myself, my husband, and our three children traveled the US for my husbands work. The last 3 years have been consistenly on the road and we have had an awesome time. However, our home state is Oklahoma and with the coronavirus going on, we decided to move back home to be close to family and friends. We were living in Colorado when I started this program, so we packed up our RV and moved back to Oklahoma. My husband had accepted a full-time permanent position in Oklahoma and felt like things were falling into place; however, when he went to orientation he was told that they were shut down. A number of things/issues followed afterwords and that is really what led to the module being difficult.
I decided that I wanted to do a Diner app, I had again started and stopped several projects, but the Diner app to avail! The most difficult aspect of this project, for me, was correctly drawing the model relationships and the nested routes. The User can sign-up and sign-in using the Devise gem and can also sign-in through Git-hub and the omniauth-github gem. The User can create a menu, create an order, see all the menu’s and orders, and edit the menus and orders. There is a lot of extra-functionality that I would like to eventually add but for now I am happy with the result! This project seemed to have had a lot more code than the Sinatra project, you really have to understand what is going on to create a Rails app, and I think that is what I enjoy most about software engineering. The never ending learning and changing!! Honestly, at times, I found it difficult to stay focused on my project with the coronavirus going on and being ill, but I am glad that I completed this project and am truly excited to see what we will learn with Javascript.
Learning Ruby on Rails has been a great deal of fun. I became very comfortable with the MVC structure, while learning Sinatra, and feel like it was the perfect way to introduce Rails. However, I am having a little bit of difficulty remembering the syntax for forms in Rails but I am sure, with some practice and google, it is something I will get very familiar with. Overall, I am amazed at how powerful Rails is and am truly excited to learn more about the in’s and out’s of this incredible extension of Ruby!