After a short weekend, it was time for week 2. And with it came our first real week project. The assignment was to build a Airbnb.com type of website in groups of 4.
This was the week that i really fell in love with coding! I mean the endless possibilities of rails, pushing each other to build new functionality, staring at your laptop thinking why in gods name is this not working!?, having to force yourself to go to bed at night cause you wanna keep coding to implement some more functionality. I can tell you it is very, very addictive!
This first project also introduced me to the challenges of working in a team. I personally think I’m a pretty good team player, I mean my baseball background prepared me for that. But still I found out it can be a challenge. You really need to take the time to catch up with your teammates and discuss the division of tasks, but that can be hard when your laptop is screaming at you: “there’s a problem come fix me!”
The main issues of this week were mostly about database relations and how to establish connections between for instance a user, the cabins he listed, and the reservations he made. It took some long days and evenings, but I think we succeeded pretty well on fixing all those issues. And did I mention already it was so much fun!
Since we hadn’t learned how to create sign up functionality yet, a lot of time the first days was spent on figuring out ways to identify which user was on the site at a particular moment and coming up with inefficient tricks to still connect that user to other models. I thought that this sign up functionality would for sure be very complicated and was kind of nervous about it. Man was I wrong. On Thursday we got introduced to Devise and I couldn’t believe how simple it was to implement. Ow and all the new possibilities. U could now check if a user was signed in, build your views dependent on that information, and so much more!
Check out our Cabins website, or look through our code at Github