So, you’ve been programming and developing all these fantastic apps for a few months now, you’ve put lots of hours and effort, and you’re extremely proud of them. You’ve shown them to friends and family when you have your computer available to do so. But then a friend asks you for a link or how to find and use the app online. With a blank stare, you say they can only be used from your computer at this point. Bummer!
Have you been asked this —or a variant of the following question?
So far I’ve built a Ruby CLI application, two traditional CRUD applications; one on Sinatra and a second on Rails. My previous project utilized a backend API to fetch data from and external API and render that data to the user utilizing traditional vanilla Javascript and JQuery. All these applications were designed with typical web-browser as the interface, and so for my last project I thought it would be good practice to build an app with an interface that would be user friendly in both the browser and mobile devices. React’s component rendering approach was the perfect way to achieve this.
For this project I decided to build a new Rails app instead of using my previous Rails project app as suggested, mainly because I wanted to keep my Rails and Ruby skills sharp, but also because we had just learned how to consume and build API applications. I figured I would create a Rails app that would consume a third party API data and use that data to render information instead of relying on using databases as we had done on the previous project. I am glad I made this decision because as challenging as it was to finish this project, it also taught me a lot about how the internet works and about general web development architecture.
For this project I figured I continue exploring the idea of a vinyl record collection management tool. This time I approached it on the side of users being able to share records with other users, and have those users comment and review them (and vice-versa).