Getting accustomed to a React framework took a considerable amount of perspective-shifting brain power for me; primarily, thinking in terms of ‘components’ inside a ‘virtual DOM’. With this new outlook came designing a component tree in all its passing-down-props glory. Then we throw in Redux, a JS library. Getting used to keeping track of state via the Redux store was another shift in thinking. But it was all worth it.
Methods vs. functions, self vs. this, objects vs. Objects (??), moving from server side to client side was…a process. The transition has not only made me more appreciative of Ruby’s easy to read syntax and error alerting, but also of the instant dynamics a single page can offer through JavaScript. Thanks to my orientation in Ruby, object oriented JS was a lot easier to grasp.
For my Ruby on Rails project, I did a refactor of my Sinatra Budget App. The basic framework is that a user can create many budgets that will have many purchases tied to them. I wanted to add an additional feature in my Rails app where a user could also have many credit cards on file and track their cashback benefits associated with those cards. Because it was a refactor (and Rails has so many built-in helpers and features), I thought it would be a relatively short journey. Boy, was I wrong.
Going through the course material for ActiveRecord and Sinatra, I was actually really excited to start building my Sinatra project. I was even looking forward to working with HTML and CSS from the MVC apps we were building in our labs. What I did not expect was ideation to take the longest to work through. For some reason, I just could not think of an original project concept. My cohort shared their project ideas and even other Flatiron student project walkthroughs, and everytime I just thought, “whelp, there’s another idea I can’t do.” Granted, I was not dedicating enough time to thinking about my project, I was just focusing on trying to learn the material since project week happened to coincide with our move out/move in dates (have to exercise those work-life balance muscles sometime, right?) For future students who find themselves in the same boat: take a couple hours to just sit and jot down possible project ideas. I tried to come up with ones that I would like to use time and time again. So that’s how I ended up building a budgeting app with Sinatra.
For my CLI portfolio project, I wanted it to be about something that I enjoyed; so I chose to make an Animal Crossing: New Horizons villager “finder.”