669 Lessons Read.
345 Labs Completed.
5 Porfolio Projects Built.
And now I’m finally ready to graduate from the Flatiron Fullstack Bootcamp!
When I started my JS with Rails API Project, the first thing I did was create my User Model and set up my login flow in Rails as usual. Only difference being that this time, I needed to pass the user info into Rails from the frontend JavaScript page and use the returned User info to build a mirroring User Class in JavaScript. This went simply enough and I got my first user created, but when I tried to do anything besides create or login - like show User details or logout for example - I got a 204 No Content error. A few well placed binding.pry and console.log, along with some time spent researching the issue online, revealed the problem. The session cookie was not persisting while commands were being passed back and forth between the sides of my website.
Ever since I heard about “The Five Ps of Success,” and probably even beforehand, the notion has always resonated strongly with me. The Five Ps, by the way, are “Prior Planning Prevents Poor Performance. I have always been a strong advocate, and my professional career has essentially been to ensure proper planning on others’ behalf. Generally when I work a project, I spend 90% of the time planning everything out so that the execution is almost an afterthought. “It’s how my mind naturally works,” is what I always explain when impatient coworkers or friends confront me about it. In fact, this is part of the reason that I thought I might be good at coding.
One thing that has really been impressed upon me time after time as I’ve been learning code is the power of standardizing. As a Process Improvement Architect, standardizing is my bread and butter - take a process that is poorly defined and build out some standard rules and it allows for all kinds of efficiency gains. But in coding, this is taken to another, incredibly impressive, level. Nowhere has this been more apparent to me than in using Sinatra to build my first web app called “My Town Tracker.” Let me explain:
The first Student Project in the Flatiron Curriculum is to create a CLI Application from scratch. This was the first time I would be working 100% without instructions to guide me and up-front, it seemed like a pretty tall order. I decided that, like all other big projects, the first thing I needed to do was to get organized.