Rails is magic if you first adventure into it without learning what’s going on behind the scenes. In the Flatiron Course you first will learn about SQL, ORMs, ActiveRecord and Sinatra. Then you will begin Rails with a foundational understanding of Rails. It’s important to understand what is going on under the hood because Rails will abstract all your coding. If there is confusion or uncertainity of what Rails is doing, it’s best to learn about the “magic” that’s occurring.
I created a hike app for the Rails Portfolio. What I didn’t realize was that I didn’t fully understand the abstraction happening in Rails. I went back and forth many times while building the rails hike app.
I had to relearn about cookies and sessions.
I had to relearn form_tag vs form_for.
I had to relearn nested resources and namespacing of resources.
I had to relearn how to build a simple flash message.
I had to figure out which was the best source for authentication. It was Devise vs CanCan vs building an authentication from scratch. I went with the latter after successfully building this alongside Omniauth via Github.
Rails is a helpful framework that cuts much of your coding time in half. That is, if you are full aware with what’s going on in all the “magic”. I rarely grasped Rails though it was exciting to learn. Since I had a swiss-cheese understanding of Rails, my portfolio project took much longer to create. I finished building a successful and smooth-running app eventually.
Again if coding was a quick learning process, almost everyone would learn to code. That isn’t the case. I wrote in a previous post about pace. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I sped through learning Rails and I didn’t benefit. Take the time to learn your coding language and understand fundamental parts. It will help you out in the future.
Here is my Rails Hike App. I am proud of the simplicity I was able to make occur in this web application.