WDI Day Thirty-One: Project Week 2, Part 3

I’ve been working like crazy, and some issues are issues that I don’t know whether or not they can be resolved. Overall this web app project has me realizing how important the planning process is. You may have a great idea, but you might want to test out a couple of things before moving forward with it.

Our projects are due on Thursday morning, so I have one more full day and night to work on my app. At the moment, it’s functioning and I’ve styled it so it nearly looks the way I’d like it to. I’ve also deployed it to Heroku so everything looks like it will function alright in production. Tomorrow night I’ll work on creating a screencast of the app, so until then, I’ll have to try to get everything ready to launch.

Goals for tonight:

  • Possibly roll out a many-to-many relationship where users can create lists.
  • Look into submitting images to a database. I’ve been struggling with this issue and have decided to put it to the side for now. I’ll visit it later to see it I can roll it out. If so, it would make the user experience a lot more seamless.

Goals for tomorrow?

  • Look into using ActionMailer for email confirmations.

WDI Day Thirty: Project Week 2, Part 2

Today was the second day where we got to work on our project 2 all day. In the morning there was a mini lesson on APIs and Rails, but after that, it was nonstop coding. What’s pretty unfortunate is that I didn’t make much progress. I’ve run into a couple of pretty large and advanced problems that my instructors haven’t been able to help me with.

One issue is that I need to figure out how to capture a screenshot of a webpage and then submit it to the database on submit of a form. The other issue is making calls to the Google API in order to change the background image of a canvas element on the page.

When you don’t make any progress, it’s tough to stay motivated and try to keep pushing forward to see what happens. Hopefully things will look better tomorrow. All I can do is keep trying new things, and hope I’ll eventually get the right results.

WDI Day Sixteen: SQL Review and a Ruby Lab

Last night I only got about two or three hours of sleep because I was determined to figure out our homework assignment. However, I ended up giving up, and turned in an incomplete assignment. This morning I got to GA pretty early, and was still determined to figure it out. Eventually I did. The problem? I was having trouble wrapping my mind around mapping arrays in Ruby. Eventually I figured it out, and although the struggle took hours, finding a solution made me feel incredibly satisfied.

During the day we focused a large chunk of time on SQL and making database queries, what relationship databases are, and figuring out the relationships between different databases. I thought SQL queries were actually pretty fun.

In the afternoon we worked on a Ruby lab, which involved creating a command line game that quizzes the user on their knowledge of the state capitals. Surprisingly enough, it was a lot easier to put together. I suppose a night of struggling with the language really paid off in the end – I even played around with using a Ruby regular expression.

This course definitely has its fair share of highs and lows, but I’m excited to see how my skills shape up in the next few weeks.

WDI Day Fifteen: Intro to Ruby

Wow, right when you’re beginning to feel comfortable with one language, your world gets flipped upside-down. Today we started working with Ruby, and although I took General Assembly’s back-end web development class a few months ago, I realize I never really quite absorbed the information.

We reviewed how Ruby is different than JavaScript, how the syntax is a bit different as well as the way to debug the language (i.e. using puts instead of console.log) and gathering user input (i.e. gets).

In the afternoon we reviewed Ruby enumerables, also known as methods to search, sort, and manipulate collections. We learned that Ruby deals with arrays as well as hashes (which are like JavaScript objects) and went over the various ways of looping that include:

  • for … in
  • while
  • until
  • loop do
  • .times

Afterwards, the class jumped on the homework assignments, and it was definitely a struggle. For the first time, it looks like I won’t be able to complete mine. However, I’m refusing to give up just yet. Hopefully I can make sense of this soon…

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