Rails Portfolio Project — Flatiron School Retrospect

I am currently an online student of Flatiron School for Software Engineering in the “self-paced” program. As of today, I just completed the Rails module where I learned a lot about Ruby on Rails, validations, and omniauth. This combined with my knowledge of Sinatra, I created a Coaching Manager app for my Rails Portfolio Project. Here, users are able to create accounts by email or through Facebook. Once signed in, users are able to book training sessions and select which coach they would like to train with. They are able to set the time and date of the session too which reserves the training area for a 30 minute block, meaning others are unable to reserve session for the exact same time.

Throughout my project, I encountered many errors in organizing my code and making it look nice. I was trying to do too much at once, but I went back over some of the course materials from the module and sectioned off each part of my project. I started with controllers and modules, built out the views, and then built the routes and made minor front-end changes to have an acceptable user experience. This project was not based on front-end development, so I shifted my focus away from that.

I ran into some troubles setting up omniauth with Facebook, but after a few videos online and looking back at the course material, it was really straight forward. I also had some planning struggles with how I wanted the pages laid out. Instead of having user profiles, I integrated the the user information in the home page that is unique to whichever user is signed in. I was coming up with the concept as I went on. Aside from that, the project went fairly smooth. I did take longer than I wanted completing completing the project, but I blame that on the holiday weekend.

One thing that I did do to show how this application could be used to for different businesses was have a simple naming scheme for models and methods. I made it as an “appointment manager” though my application is coaching manager. This is so it is easy to see how this can be applied for other service businesses such as realtors, landscaping, consulting, etc.

I am very proud of my project, though I will continue to build it out after this assessment so I can address minor tweaks that I want made including front-end development and small features.