PHASE 2 Project : E -View
If you happened to read my first blog, you would know that I am still fairly new to coding. After going through Phase 1, having to worry about the coding challenge retake as well as projects all in the same week, I prepared every day relentlessly to pass the CC on the first try for Phase 2. Thankfully I did, and ended up having a full week and a half to create our project.
Background of the application:
The application’s main goal should be to hit CRUD (CREATE, READ, UPDATE, DESTROY).
- Users will be routed to the home page when they enter localhost:3000/
- Users should be prompted to create an account to navigate the app
- Once an account is created, Users can see all the top Electric Vehicles
- A user upon creating an account has a secure password (courtesy of the bcrypt gem)
- Users can make a review and rate a certain vehicle
- Users can like other user’s reviews if they found it helpful
- Users can earn points/badges if other users find their post helpful and can level up
- A user has the ability to Edit/Delete their account
Link to Github: https://github.com/wickedvic/E-View/tree/bones
For my second project here at Flatiron we were tasked with building out a web application with the help of Ruby on Rails. My partner (Matt Ogtong) and I decided on building out an app for reviewing purely Electric Vehicles with a few fun perks.
We had set it up so that when any user first goes localhost:3000/ they are automatically routed to the home page. Here, users are prompted to sign up before they can visit any other pages within the application. Once a user is created, they now have the ability to look at all the top rated Electric Vehicles found for sale today. The end goal of this application is to allow a platform for users to check out the top rated EV’s and see reviews left by every day users of that car.
At first implementing the logic for our models was a challenge and took numerous amounts of google searches. However we managed to finish the bulk of our project by Saturday of the first week leaving us with a couple of days to finish off the CSS for the app.
Before building out this application, I never knew how important CSS was to the general look of a website. If you don’t believe me, below is a screenshot of our homepage without any CSS vs with.
Although this is only a small part of our homepage, you can still see the vast difference between having CSS vs not having it.
Learning CSS thus far has been a love hate relationship. The learning curve was pretty difficult, however I was truly blessed to have a partner who has been also working relentlessly on this project. We definitely came pretty far in the mere span of a week and I cant’t wait to present what we have spent countless hours working on.
A few styling tips that may come in handy if you are reading this. A lot of our CSS was done thanks to the help of the bootstrap gem. For instance, on the homepage we have a carousel of top rated EV’s, a card to show testimonials from others who have used this website, our highest rated EV from our website. The bootstrap gem documentation consists of all the code needed to implement this general look to your website. All you have to do is plug in the information that you want to implement/show. Although it sounds easier said than done, once you get the general sense of how one page of your application is done, the others become way more manageable.
As I am writing this blog, it is two days before we are set to present our project. Although we still have to finish up the final touches, I am extremely proud of what we have built out so far. I never would have thought myself to be capable enough to accomplish such a task. Only 6 weeks ago I was still learning the basic fundamentals of RUBY, understanding arrays and hashes, and now I am about to finish Phase 2 with a somewhat solid understanding of Ruby on Rails.
As I finish up this Phase, the next is the beginning of Javascript. Although I am truly nervous for whats to come, I am definitely ready to face it head on and build out another kick ass application down the line.
