Right before Christmas is hardly the ideal time to begin working on a new portfolio project, but that was the hand I was dealt with my Sinatra project, and so I got to work. It was difficult working on it during the craziness of the holidays, but from doing so I gained one valuable piece of advice: take it at your own pace! Many times I only managed to work for an hour or so a day. Others, I could sit down and work all day. But once I accepted that some days would move faster than others, I gained a lot more peace of mind in my work.
But rather than focus on broad advice, let me elaborate on what I did. My Sinatra app has the simple and self-explanatory title of “Sinatra Birdwatching”. The idea behind the app was that it should allow users to do the following:
- Create an account with username and password
- Report bird sightings in their area
- View an index of all bird sightings from all users
- Edit and delete their own sightings
- Log out
The first step to do this was to establish the database tables and the relationships of the corresponding models. I created three tables:
- Users, containing a username and password
- Birds, containing a species
- Sightings, a join table containing a User id, Bird id, time and place
As for the model relationships:
- A User has many Sightings, and has many Birds through Sightings
- A Bird has many Sightings and has many Users through Sightings
- A Sighting belongs to a User and belongs to a Bird
After this, I began building the controllers and views. I followed the same structure that was seen in the Learn labs leading up to the project, having a different controller file for each of my models, and an Application Controller file they all inherit from, which contains essential components such as session_secret:. This parent file also contained the helper methods logged_in? and current_user, which I borrowed from the Fwitter lesson.
Throughout the rest of the process of writing my controller routes and views, I found myself relying heavily upon the previous lessons, reviewing the work I did there to guide me in writing everything correctly here. However, I hit one major snag when creating the main Sighting index page. I wanted each Sighting to display the name of the user who reported it with its other information. But no matter what I tried, it wouldn’t work, coming up blank at best and at worst breaking the page completely. This problem had me held up for days before I discovered it was a simple extra space on the index page(“user name” instead of “username”). The moral of this story is when in doubt, take a break! Nearly every time such an issue appeared, I solved it by walking away and coming back later when I had a fresh mind.
Overall, it’s taken me three weeks to get my project working, but I’m happy with the result. I even have room to add extra functions, and managed to add a (small) amount of CSS styling to it. So if you’re getting stressed about this project, take my advice: don’t! Work on it as long as you can, and take breaks when you need it, and you’ll have yours up and running in no time.