My First App

vanracks

So after many trials and tribulations, I have finally actually started looking into Rails more seriously. I first thought about learning web development a couple years ago, and naturally just got distracted and was too busy to continue. (Or some sort of excuse along those lines) But now that I’m done school and looking for work, I’ve come across many job postings for web developers. I’ve always been up to date with web technologies, but never actually implemented and looked under the hood of them. With all these coding bootcamps popping up everywhere, I figured I already had enough technical chops to pick up learning Rails on my own.

Choosing a Tutorial

Hartl rails tutorial

I decided to go with the Hartl tutorial, it seemed to contain enough depth for me, and good coverage. What I’ved learned is that the best way for me to learn is to go through an example, and then deconstruct it to figure out how it works. Essentially working backwards from a good example, and then piecing it back together. So after going through the Hartl tutorial, I grabbed a repo off an app and worked my way through it. Sometimes it’s fun to take a more complex project and take some time to work through it. In the end, what I’ve learned so far is that web development is very involved, and there’s a lot of hocus pocus going on behind the scenes. Rails does a ton of magic that makes everything work together, but this also means that you might run into errors that are much harder to figure out.

Vancouver Bike Racks

The app that I deployed was adjusted from a fire hydrant app for people to adopt a hydrant to clean it out during the winter. Fortunately that isn’t a problem for the city of Vancouver so I decided to change it up. When I was looking at the hydrant data, it was all very boring and unexciting since the streets are laid out in a grid, it was very easy to predict where hydrants are placed. Instead I decided to show the location of bike racks in Vancouver, and allow people to adopt a bike rack to keep clean. Seemed appropriate.