#learn.co

So...this one was tough.

I really struggled with the labs leading up to this and as a result I was late getting started. I didn’t even want to jump into it until I felt I had a clue what I was doing which wasn’t until Wednesday of the first week we had allotted to work on this. 

That said, I really learned a lot about how to approach projects like this. By the time I got started, I realized I was really much more prepared than I thought I was. Nothing to it but to do it! By the end of the first week I already had the bulk of a working app down. I really just needed to trust myself and the process and really dig into the resources I already have available to me. 

In the end, I’m really very proud of what I created here. There were several really interesting challenges that I was able to overcome. What was interesting was that the things I really struggled with ultimately weren’t the basic requirements of the project, but rather, the extra stuff; the stuff I wanted to add because I wanted to really refine and enhance the final project. I was excited to flex my CSS muscles, and despite the fact that my stylesheet is a bit convoluted and definitely needs refactoring, what is displayed in the end looks, frankly, really freaking cool!

This is mmovies.

I went into this project with very little idea of how I would start. I really had to use the resources around me to even begin, but first I had to come up with an idea of what I even wanted to make. Almost on a whim, after a conversation about comic book movies with my nephew, I decided to make something related to returning results related to MCU movies.

After a bit more thought, it seemed like a simple enough task: display a list of all MCU films in order, and then allow the user to get more information about each one. I had a basic idea of what sort of data I wanted to return, title of course, release date, director, and maybe a brief summary. The next step was figuring out where I would scrape this data from.

Initially, I thought that the best source for this was either going to be wikipedia or the official Marvel website. Upon an initial look at the pages themselves and inspecting the code some, I decided to use the official Marvel website.

Here I saw the movie names, and the release date very clearly displayed. Somehow, I didn't think about the fact that any information beyond that lived on pages on click through links and that all of that information was displayed very differently depending on the current level of promotional attention each film was receiving, and whether or not the film had been released yet. This was getting tricky.

My time with Learn Verified is up (assuming I pass my live assessment on Wednesday). I wanted to use this last blog post to thank some really important people (and things). So, thank you to:

IRB, Tux, rails console, pry, javascript console, and everything else that allowed me to step into my code/database and check out my return values. I couldn’t have done this without you.

The professor for my summer Calc III class, for letting me drop the test I did somewhat poorly on because I spent the entire week before coding instead of doing the homework.

@karliekloss for inspiring me to stick with coding even though I had a million other interests and couldn’t figure out what I wanted to do. Last year, I had the opportunity to ask Karlie how she managed to code even though she obviously had another full time job and was traveling constantly. She mentioned how she continued to use Learn online, and during my time in Europe I found myself doing the same.

And lastly, I have to thank Lydia and Alayna for everything they’ve done for me, from driving me to the airport in Chicago to picking fonts and colors to tirelessly typing book information. I didn’t even know them a year ago, but they have supported me constantly, even while I was away in Europe for six months. 

Lydia is one of the most thoughtful people I have ever met. She is so on top of EVERYTHING and I have no doubt that I’ll be in my forties and still receiving emails from her about programs/products/etc I should check out. Book Up wouldn’t exist without Lydia’s creativity and smarts (she’s from the first Kode with Karlie class), and I am so grateful to have worked with her on this project.

I used to think that I was a hard worker, but I pale in comparison to Alayna. By now, she has probably typed thousands of lines of book information, not to mention the hours she has spent looking up amazon links, and high quality image links for each book as well. Without Alayna’s willingness to basically single-handedly create the database we needed, I know Book Up would never have gotten off the ground.

// LEARN LOVE CODE

I think this is going to end up being a part 1 of 2 posts again. This one will be about the actual project and then the next will be about everything I’ve learned during my time at the Flatiron School.

So this is a basic version of Book Up (with a new color scheme and fonts!) and it’s built with an Angular front end and Rails API backend. I initially really underestimated how much time this project would take me. I thought that because I was using an app that I had already built, adding the Angular front end part would be relatively easy.

It turns out I really didn’t understand Angular or what a front end framework even was until maybe 20 hours after I started this project. I initially tried to just use my Rails version of Book Up and add my Angular files, but I couldn’t get anything to display and I didn’t know if I had a routing problem, a controller problem, or some sort of issue with my services. In the end, I spent maybe 10 hours just reading tutorials and docs and creating really, REALLY basic (Hello World level) Angular apps.

Once I finally understood how Angular was supposed to interact with my Rails API, I turned the original Book Up Rails App into an API. I then turned one of my really basic Angular projects into a basic version of Book Up that just displayed the text from a random book. I had two servers running, one for the API and one for the Angular app, and I realized that I had to combine them at some point.

So I started my final project a third time, and I realized that I was so much more comfortable with Angular because of all the time I’d spent taking my time to look at it more closely. And so here we are at the end:

I had to build a quick app for my JQuery/AJAX assessment, so naturally I made a To Read List app (since I might as well stick with the theme). Even after a lot of reading and tutorials on JQuery, I didn’t really understand the whole idea of a rails API backend. I kept getting really frustrated because the data from my GET requests kept rendering as this thing that looked like a hash (which I lated realized was JSON) instead of html, and suddenly it clicked that that was literally exactly what was supposed to happen and that that was what the point of building your own API was.

So I just created a really simple app that lets you enter book titles and have them immediately appear. You can delete and check off books, as well as edit the information for each book without refreshing the page. I also used the Devise gem (which I am beginning to love) to allow users to login/logout.

I was reluctant to style this app at all because I was so sick of only styling Book Up for the past week, but thankfully, my styling expert, Lydia, was on hand to select fonts and colors for me. So in the end I didn’t have much to do but center and pad a few divs. Working with Lydia is actually a dream because she insists on sending you links and hex codes again just so you don’t have to go through your texts to find them. Also once I tried to open a new tab to look up a google fonts import code and Lydia insisted on getting that for me too. 

Also deserving of mention is Alayna, who spent the car ride back from her college orientation entering books into the Book Up database. Alayna once promised me that I wouldn’t believe the number of books she put into the database in 48 hours and I am proud and happy to say that she was right. 

Because I’m so horribly bad at keeping up with these.

Anyway, this one is going to be short and sweet because I’ll be writing a ton about this web app in the upcoming week.

I built this project for my Rails Assessment, but before it was that, it was my project at the Flatiron School’s Precollege Intro to Software Engineering course. I came up with the idea with my two wonderful partners (now best friends), Lydia and Alayna, and somehow it ended up getting completed even after being shelved while I was busy figuring my life out in Europe.

Book Up allows users to select books based only on the text of the first page of the book. By formatting all of the first pages in the same way, Book Up removed a potential reader’s ability to judge a book by its font size, weight, author, cover, etc.

The most important thing I learned during the course of this Sinatra project was that waiting until I felt like writing this blog post and recording my video walkthrough just made me not want to do it even more. But, before I get into that:

The Basics

Here’s a link to the repo.

So the app allows people to recommend books to each other. I used my newly acquired (at the time) knowledge of sessions to build a very basic authentication system. I faced two particularly challenging issues while building my book recommendation app: The first was the fact that all objects of the User class could recommend books and be recipients of book recommendations. I ended up simplifying this by adding a “recommender_id” foreign key to my Recommendations table (which was the join table for my Users and Books tables). This way, the “user_id” of the recommendation would be that of the person whose page the book appeared on, but the recommender’s information was still stored and easily accessible. I also create custom setter and getter methods in the Recommendation class for recommender_id just so I could work with it as easily as I worked with my other Active Record objects.

The second issue was my utter inability to style forms. I ended up getting a bit more comfortable with Bootstrap while styling this app, but I still cannot figure out how to style forms the way I would like them. I ended up just centering all the forms. I’ve been trying to style the forms in my next project for the past three days so hopefully I have a breakthrough soon. (Also, the styling on my next project, is much, much, MUCH better so stay tuned for that blog post/video walkthrough.)

EDIT

The forms look totally fine in this app. I literally waited so long to record this video walkthrough and write this blog post that I forgot that I do know how to style forms. The styling issue that i had was that I wanted to display my books in a grid formation but couldn’t get the spacing right.

Reflections

If you know me personally, you probably already know how excited I am to be learning to code at the Flatiron school.  I am roughly one month into the program so far and loving it.  

I’ve just wrapped up writing a Ruby gem that allows you to search Indeed.com for jobs for a selected zip code.  It’s been a fun project, once I got started.  It seemed like the hardest part was finding a project that interested me.  I finally settled on a job search, because I hope to be needing that type of service in the next few months.

The gem has a CLI which asks the user to enter a zip code and search terms in order to pull the first 10 jobs returned. My gem gives the option to get more information about each job listing and even allows the user to open the job listing on Indeed.com if they would like more information or to apply.  The only problem is I keep thinking of things I would like to add to it.  Currently the interface only returns the top 10 jobs, but I’d like to add the functionality to list ALL jobs. I know it’s not the most feature rich or the most snazzy gem you’ve ever seen, but it’s my first and I’m proud of it.

If you want to check it out, my source is located at GitHub.