Taking the plunge to learn how to code can be scary and if it’s brand new for you it can feel completely overwhelming: you’re literally learning a new language. You have to set up your local environment, connect it to your Learn account, and learn how to clone repositories and push code to Github. It’s a lot.
One of my favorite things in the world is camping. I don’t consider myself an outdoor person but there’s something about waking up, opening your eyes, and seeing nothing but trees and the sky that makes me never want to go back to NYC. That and you can be lazy all day long - read, nap in a hammock, do crossword puzzles by the fire - and it’s totally acceptable. My boyfriend and I go at least once a year and we always have an amazing time but when we went a few weeks ago we forgot a few key items - paper towels and soap - and had to leave the campsite to go buy those things, which totally ruins the camping experience! This made us decide to create an extensive camping checklist so we never make the same mistake again, and thus this project idea was born.
Although creating a project using both Rails and JavaScript seemed daunting at first, after I learned that a few of my cohort-mates were choosing to create a game for their projects I got excited. I had a few ideas but ultimately decided to create a version of a game my family and I used to play together when I lived at home. Our local newspaper had a games section and every day they would publish a new word in this section. The goal was to write down as many words as possible that could be formed from the published word. The words had to be at least 4 letters, could only use each letter from the published word once, and, of course, had to be actual words. My project is a web app version of this game.
From the very early days of our boot camp we’ve learned to keep our code DRY (Don’t Repeat Yourself). A few ways to do this include controller helper methods, model helper methods, and my favorite - partials!
Many people have a list of restaurants they’d like to eat at one day, although the way people keep track of this list differs by person. I keep a running list in the Notes app on my phone, save Instagram posts, and bookmark articles that I come across, but I don’t have one central place that keeps track of the list of names and details about the restaurants I’d like to visit in a consistent way. I’d love to have one, so for my Sinatra Portfolio Project, I created a CRUD MVC app that allows users to keep track of restaurants on their bucket lists and to store and update information about those restaurants.