You’ve all heard it before - global variables are evil! A surefire route spaghetti-code hell and bugville central….not to mention a dead giveaway of a beginner’s mindset.
Vanilla Forum is a standalone app for Rails that aims to be a basic no-frills forum web application. My goal was to create an application that provides the basic functionality of forums, topics and posts with some of the more popular content and social features of platforms such as Quora and Reddit.
I organize events in my local area for Product Hunt– a very popular community platform for startups to get feedback and exposure - and I wanted to build a startup mentoring database and CMS. This would give attendees to my events a directory in which to list their startup and find support from mentors who are also listed within the directory platform.
I had always loved the design of the Startup Grind website but the UX and formatting of the events page did not make for an efficient or fast browse or information retrieval process. So I decided to use the CLI Gem project as an opportunity to build a scraper that would facilitate easy retrieval of information about future Startup Grind events around the world.
I am now in week three of my Flatiron journey and nothing could have prepared me for the gamut and range of emotions I have felt in my latest incarnation as a student of software engineering. From complete despair to elation, the yo-yoing between the cliff of confusion and the upswing of competence can happen as much as 2-3 days in the same day, which inevitably leaves me wondering whether there is something wrong with my brain and my ability to retain information.