Planning
I began the process of planning my JavaScript Portfolio Project about a week before beginning the coding process. For previous projects this planning process has played an essential role in the success of my work and ability to structure my code easily. To me it feels like taking a bird’s eye view to my project. When I am in the middle of coding a project I feel like (at least at this point in my software engineering journey) I have a bit of tunnel vision, and if I just dive right into it without taking the time to plan out the big picture I often get a little lost and scattered. I find it vital to take the time to create the user story for my app and the outline of how the project will be structured. I like to break this into sections. For the Javascript project I started by writing out my models and their relationships/attributes, controllers with the actions I thought I would need, routes and fetch requests I anticipated making, and an app flow diagram/description.
While this project has taken me the longest to complete, it is definitely the project that helped build my confidence and solidify concepts the most. I created a web-base Rails application that serves the purpose of providing users with a submission-generated list of vegan friendly restaurants sorted by state. User’s are able to signup or signin (either manually or with the help of OAuth through Facebook), see their profile (which houses their information as well as any restaurants they may have submitted), go to the index page for states (each of which is a link to an index of the restaurants that have been submitted for that state), view the show page for an individual restaurant and create a review for it, create a restaurant submission, or logout. Further, users are able to edit restaurants and reviews that they submitted (only if they submitted them) as well as edit their own profile information.
The way that models, views, and controllers work together feels very organic to me; like the ebb and flow of the ocean. This project really solidified my understanding of MVC structure and the ways in which each element works together to connect the user to the database. I began this project by brainstorming on paper how I wanted my domain model to be set up. The first step that I took was to draw out the models I planned to use, including their attributes and the relationships between them. This visual representation helped me to start to picture what the rest of my web-app was going to look like.
During this project I learned that it is very easy to let yourself feel isolated, inadequate, and overwhelmed when faced with your first (or potentially second, third, and fourth) solo based code endeavour. In the beginning of the project I remember seeing the blank slate of my Learn IDE Sandbox and feeling my mind becoming a blank slate as well. This was a very scary feeling.