I have a CLI app that I created in Ruby for my first project at Flatiron School. I’m pretty proud of what I accomplished in just a couple of days. The app was built from scratch with nothing but the basic knowledge of Ruby that I learned in a little over a week. The fact that the user interface was working in time for my presentation was a huge relief. I had something to show everyone, and it brought me back to my early days of programming in a dos prompt — where my interest in coding truly began.
my first Ruby CLI app
As cute and nostalgic as my little app was, I knew I wanted to build on it someday. My goal was to give my users a more visual and interactive experience as they navigated through my text-based app. I had visions of adding more user stories, and some cool ASCII graphics with a background soundtrack of cheesy arcade music. To add more under the hood and additional flair would take a bit of time and attention — and time was not on my side while attending school. Vowing to come back to it, I put my project expansion on the back burner while Mod 2 of Flatiron got underway.
In Mod 2, I began to learn Ruby on Rails. Rails is a web application framework that is written in Ruby and provides the backend functionality of a database and a web server, as well as the front end functionality of creating web pages for the user experience. It took me some effort to understand Rails, as I clumsily tried to keep track of all the many moving parts. I at times literally felt like I was on a runaway freight train, just trying to grasp at all the information that was coming at me. Rails is actually a beast of a framework, and there is A LOT to learn. One thing that was helpful to think about is that there is a process to everything you do when you are building things in Rails. This makes it easier to break the entire process down step by step. It is also true that the more you do something, the better you get at it. I learned a great deal by making mistakes and learning how to fix them.
The brilliance of Rails is that you can see your mistakes happening directly in the web browser as you code. Having an artistic and creative background, I need to see things and to learn by doing. Rails gives me both of those qualities. I also lack patience (I’m learning how to unlearn this), so the fact that there’s just so much you can do in such a short amount of time, when creating a basic web app, is a form of instant gratification for me. I can see what I’m building in real time, which gets me super excited to build things!
#web-app-development #ruby-on-rails #rails #ruby-on-rails-development #model-view-controller
