Read on to find out about my side project!
Update from last week: uploaded my portfolio site.
Started the first day trying to apply my newfound Git knowledge from the previous week and promptly messed up! Great thing about coding is that everyone else seems to have made the same mistake before, so I learnt how to undo commits to Git (and Github). Okay fine, not everyone, just me and 5 other clueless people.
And then it was time to start on Rails.
The rest of this going to be in the ORID format.
1. Objective:
What did you do this week?
First, we tried to move our portfolio site from the previous week onto a rails server. Nothing much here, just following a guide and trying to understand what each step did.
I very quickly realized that my CSS wasn’t up to snuff. Looks like defining a class with the same name on different CSS files isn’t a good idea… Rails loaded them all at the same time.
The next day, we got down and built a web app that actually used Rails (i.e. with the database). We also did some database exercises (both SQL and using Rails functions) to learn how to access data.
Wednesday was where it got interesting. All that groundwork so we could finally build a functioning form! Where’s Wordpress when you need it…
Thursday and Friday, we were given time to build our reading list app.
Was quite happy that I managed to figure out the toggle button on the ‘Read?’ column, and also add the CSS styles to change the button style.
Over the weekend, I also spent a few hours on a side project to solve a problem that we face in the Host ministry in church.
We usually use Telegram to keep track of the guests that come for the first time, so that we can connect them to the right people. The problem is that when a few people are typing at the same time, it gets messy, and at the end of the day, someone needs to compile all the information into a single list.
It seemed like something I could solve with a standard database and form, and then some method of exporting in our usual format.
The end result: Doesn’t look amazing, but it works! Two things I was proud of: 1) Figuring out the mobile view. I didn’t want the user to have to scroll horizontally on a mobile phone, so I searched for a method to “transpose” the headings and content. 2) Implementing (okay, copying) the JS button that allowed me to output the data in exactly the right format for pasting into our Telegram chat.
2. Reflective:
How did you feel this week?
This week was good, I think building functioning web apps feels great! And the side project definitely helped because I was solving a real-world problem. Now, to deploy it on a live server…
3. Interpretive:
What did you learn this week? (not a lecture note) Any reflection, questions, and problems
For this week, I think it was more of the same. The pre-reading wasn’t that structured, and it was more of an overview of Rails, rather than an explanation of how to do things, so a lot of what we did this week was figuring things out — so basically Google.
4. Decisional:
What are you going to do next week? (plan or goal for the next week)
My goal is to deploy my side project, and make that fully live so we can use it!