“Ruby on Rails”, is probably the thing that I’ve heard the most in my journey to learn to program. So you can just imagine my excitement when I realized I was finally going to learn Rails and build my very own project. Fortunately, my last project was a web app made with Sinatra and given that Rails and Sinatra are very similar I got up running with my Rails project instantly.
Probably the hardest part about this Rails project was figuring out what it’s even going to be about exactly. I knew that I couldn’t create another blog nor a password management app since I already made apps like that before. So I started to think hard about what I see people doing constantly, it wasn’t until one day when I was scrolling through Facebook I saw someone doing a raffle for a new car, and saw how often the owner had to constantly update the post and how often users had to comment that they wanted to enter and that when I said to my self, “wouldn’t it be easier to have an app that updates on it own, and randomly selects the winner “? And that exactly the app I decided to create.
The excitement I had to start this project came back to bite me at the end. When I was reviewing the project with a friend I realized that I had no way of selecting a winner! Because of this, I had to redo my database and add new columns for the needed associations. I now made it so that a Raffle will belong to a user and also to the winner that way if need be both users can reference the same raffle. Made the user model have an array of all the raffles that they have entered and all that they have won. Another big drawback occurred at the very end of the project, and that was that I was not familiar at all with how to give rails’ view helper methods styling. I was able to overcome this by using the best tool for any web developer out there, google’s dev tools, by using the dev tools I was able to figure out what was the generated class and id for a lot of my helper methods, making it easier to style.
Overall I was very happy with the outcome of the project and how fast I was able to get it done even though their obstacles in every corner. The one thing that I would do differently is not to speed through the project's planning stages and to make sure that all the necessary features have been met before moving forward. Working with Rails was surprisingly easy, given that Rails is a huge vast framework that professionals deal with constantly, knowing this also motivates more to becoming working full-stack engineer.
