Another week another project. We were building a social media site this time, so say hello to database relations! I mean a user can have posts, those posts can have likes (or hugs in our case) and comments, then a user can make connections with friends, but friends don’t really exist, they are just users wearing their friend-hat. Still following? As u can imagine it took some time to figure all these connections out.
Not that we really had the time cause this week we also got introduced to JavaScript and jQuery. At first I didn’t really feel much for diving into these languages when ruby still had so many unanswered questions. All the semi-colons, parentheses, comma’s and var declarations didn’t help either :) Until now I never really got all those people saying I wish the day had more hours, but that’s exactly what I caught myself saying after realizing it was 01.00 am once again.
The many challenges this project presented brought out a side of me I didn’t really know yet. I was so annoyed with not completely grasping all the connections and how to code them out, that one night I just started typing every possible solution I could think of. All of which failed miserably one way or the other of course :) Code was flying left and right and I started feeling like a nutty professor on a laptop. But all to little effect. Around 2 am I had to admit my defeat and go to bed pissed of and unsatisfied.
The teachers had already said that there will be times you gotta let a problem go for a while and just do something completely different. Well the next day proved this lesson to be completely on point. We hardly had time to think about our projects with workshops and lectures almost all through the day. Then in the car home I got this clear feeling in my head. All of a sudden I couldn’t wait to get on my laptop again, I got it! I think it took an hour and a half to code out what I couldn’t figure out in 6 hours the night before. I mean the code was anything but efficient or pretty, but I understood the concept and was able to make it work.
At the end of the week we managed to have a site that had close to all the functionality we set out for. Cause of the little time we had this week for the project I doubt that more then 5 lines of code were written to style the frontend, with the consequence that in our group any un-styled collection of lists now carries my name. Ah well, I guess I’ll wear it with pride :)
Visit our Hug me site, and feel free to signup and send me a friendrequest there :)
Or check out the code at Github