The running theme of my experience throughout the Flatiron School projects has been overpromising features to myself, and then underdelivering. This project was no different, but it was definitely the project where I learned the most. The Rails section took me almost 7 months to complete due to various reasons. I moved, got engaged, had a job change, etc., etc… but the point is that this project was basically me relearning all the components of the Ruby on Rails framework. Although that made for a pretty barebones application, I feel like that also helped to more deeply understand all the different features and components that Rails has to offer. I was able to relearn topics and then immediately apply to them an application that I was working on. That made them stick better in my head and also made me feel more motivated in the end. Although I’m not necessarily proud of the app that I made and it doesn’t have all the features that I originally wanted to include in it, I feel proud of what I was able to accomplish with the power of googling and self-teaching.
One thing that I am particularly proud of is the styling of this application. I utilized Bootstrap 5 heavily for this project to implement Javascript based features while having basically no knowledge of Javascript. I have modals, dropdown menus, and collapsible content all by learning a bit of Bootstrap. So … even though the application is pretty barebones feature wise, I am proud of the foundation that I built with the app and think this is one that I will actually continue working on as my experience with development progresses.
