For my Javascript/rails project I took an idea I had used for the cli project and created an app that uses a deck of tarot cards to give the user a three card draw to give them insight into a question. This is the first project where I decided to use a different database. The Json file I wanted to seed my database with contained arrays and sqlite3 did not support this type of column so I went with Postgre.
The ruby on rails project was a wonderful learning experience. It also felt extremely satisfying to build a functioning web application. I found it extremly helpful to take breaks when I got stuck and to keep trying when I continued to fail on the same thing. Writing my thoughts down on paper was helpful to see things from a bigger picture perspective and often helped me formulate a better way of searching for the answer.
I feels good to actually build a working web application. Aside from understanding how to write code I also gained a lot of knowledge in how urls send requests to execute crud functions. crud being create,render,update and destroy. The mvc structure was interesting, when I started learning to code I was curious how all the files in larger and larger applications communicate and are structured. The model, view, controller structure made a lot of sense. The models are responisble for connecting to a table in a database, the controller is used to get objects from the model and send them to the view to display to a user. I am proud of how far I have come in such a short amount of time.
My first project during my cohort at Flatiron School was to build a Ruby cli gem that used data scraped from the internet using the nokogiri gem. Getting through this project required being comfortable with all the basic Ruby skills as well as object oriented programming. The trickiest part was getting the correct data with nokogiri. I used binding.pry to help stop my code and explore the data returned by nokogiri. My completed project was a Ruby gem that scraped a deck of fortune card data, made a ruby object for each card/deck and printed fortunes to the console. Upon completion I felt I had a good understanding of looping, logic and conditionals, iteration, data structures, and object oriented programming in Ruby.
I spend a lot of time Youtube, too much time maybe. I was watching a comedy/tech channel and one of the sponsors was a site offering free coding courses to beginners. I decided to check it out and it felt natural to me from the start. I spent the next couple months learning as a hobby from various online resources and books. At this point in my life I was ready to make a career move, I was enjoying coding but wanted a way to level up fast and make it a career. I was looking for a structured format to learn some of the popular technologies being used while actually building apps, working with other people and having support from experienced programmers. I found all of this and more at Flatiron Schools full time software engineering bootcamp. After graduating I felt confident in my skills as a developer and my ability to continue learning and growing in this field.