My Rails Project: Cuttle Buddies
To be honest, I was a little nervous starting the project. I felt like I wasn’t 100% sure what I was doing despite having done most of my lessons. It wasn’t until I coded along with some examples as practice that everything really started to click. In addition, I took notes, took screen shots of certain segments of code that I knew I would either be using or referring to regularly until I memorized it.
The idea for my project came from my wife, with whom we used a relationship app that we used years ago. It allowed us to send little notes to each other, make lists and send each other cute stickers. The app in particular eventually stopped being updated to the point where it was no longer useable, and thus I thought of making a spiritual successor of sorts. I had learned a little bit of swift to program an iphone app version of my idea and while I didn’t get too far, I did have basic login functionality coded. I then took the idea in with my rails project and built on it. While I would like to eventually finish my iphone app, I feel that the rails website version is a good model for what I would want to add to the phone app.
When I was coding my project, I have the tendency to style my pages while simultaneously coding the functionality. While I know I should probably wait until later to style and focus on the functionality, I feel that it helps me plan out the page better and to think of new functions to put into the page. I do a lot of googling to see what kind of buttons or layouts I can use and I also pay attention to every day websites I use to see what they did to style their sites.
Pair programming has been another thing that has been immensely helpful. Having a second set of eyes to look at your code or just suggest changes to your styling is extremely valuable. In addition, as a user, having someone else to test your code and suggest quality of life updates to your program really helps the code advance in a more user friendly direction. I also feel like I can reinforce my own knowledge of what I’ve learned when I assist someone or explain a concept or piece of code to them.