While working on my Rails Portfolio Project, I realized that I had one relationship that was fulfilling two different requirements. I wasn’t comfortable with that, so before submitting my project (and likely getting told that I’ll need to revisit those specs), I decided to challenge myself by adding new models and relationships to my existing project.
Repetition was the theme in this section. By the end, when you reach the Sinatra portfolio project you’ve had plenty of pratice in creating dynamic web applications (with SQLite, Rack, Sinatra and ActiveRecord). Practicing those back and forth routes and views with the needed information to create, read, update and delete (CRUD) data is what almost makes you feel like you haven’t learned anything new when you get to your Sinatra project.
Well, my first piece of advice when working on your CLI Data Gem project would be to code. every. day. Hopefully you are already doing this. Because they tell us to, and that it’s important. They’re obviously right. I was doing that. It was going great. Then we had our first child. Wow, talk about an amazing thing. But it suddenly made balancing life, work and school so much more difficult. At first, a day or two would sneak by without coding. Then, sometimes a few days. I found myself needing to review some of the finer details of things I had already mastered. Review time means no new learning. Finding even half an hour every day to code/learn will keep you on track.
Why did I decide to learn software development? I was a math major in college, but being an actuary (the only career option I was told there would be) didn’t sound very exciting. Actuaries are now being used in many industries, but that’s now, not back then.