I get by with a little help from my friends
Last week I had the opputunity to work on a lab with a Flatiron student. I could have done the project alone but I decided I need practice working with others. For our lab we needed to build the right views, models and controller actions to create the Fwitter App, a contraction for Flatiron Twitter. Let me tell you, it was a fun experience.
I reached out to many students in the same neigborhood of the course. I didn’t reach out to my student partner, she instead saw my @here post on a Slack channel and wanted to work with me. I was immediately excited to work with Elyse. Her coding style is a bit different from mine but in general we had the same thought process and agreed on how we wanted to create Fwitter. We paired up and finished three fourths of the lab by the end of the day. It’s so wonderful how much better you can code when working with someone else or with multiple people. The next day we finished our Fwitter lab with all the tests green!
I haven’t given myself enough practice with HTML and CSS styling. I am real excited to practice more with that but for the past few months doing the course, it was’t a priority. Enter, again, Elyse. She played around often enough in a few of the previous labs that she had more offering on the way to make our Fwitter app aestethically pleasing. I would watch along as she decided we should make the background this photo, or put the logo on this side, or display the tweets in this fashion. She is my CSS and HTML go-to now.
I call SHOTGUN!
Well not for the seating arrangement but for arranging and displaying your code in the broswer. Shotgun has become a favorite and very functional gem for me. You’re able to test how your code will display in the browser. Shotgun is also quickly responsive. If I saw my code displayed a certain way and wanted to modify that, I could have Shotgun running in my terminal, modify the code in the editor, save it and refresh the browser to see the modifications made.
This makes the creation of an app simpler to build. As a web developer in-training, I want to be able to display my work and know what needs to be reconfigured in a simple, useful way. Elyse and I used Shotgun countless times to make Fwitter exactly how we wanted. It became more excited when we designed this app to look fun and alive.
Ready to Deploy
In one of my previous blog post I wrote about how I was set in over-achiever mode. I have since changed my pace that effectively helps me learn. With the end of building this working Fwitter app lab, Elyse decided she really wanted to make our Fwitter lab an actual working web application. Heroku is the platform which our Fwitter App is now deployed. It is very exciting and surreal to us both that we turned our lab into a working application.
Prior to deployment, we had other students fork and clone our lab via GitHub, then run Shotgun to play with our app. Now anyone can see our Fwitter app creation to make an account, post new tweets, edit or delete tweets and read other user’s tweets. I dare you to give it a whirl.
Here is a run down on how to use the app. Let us know what you think!