CLASSic mistakes and headaches
Tags: flatiron, softwaredevelopment, bootcamp, ruby
Published: 2021-03-27 16:38:36



In wonderful fantasy realms, you're given the opportunity to leave your problems (be them family, friend, or debugging). You're able to change your name, age, race (who doesn't want to be a gnome!), and class. And once you assign all these new values to your character, you should be able to check them right? With the help of Active Record, you're able to check the value of your name, age, and race, by simply calling the .name, etc method! So logic would indicate you could determine the class of your beefy orc by calling .class. Right?
Oh Jill. Not Right.
Just like you can call methods to see the variety of methods you can call on any object, you can also call .class to **identify the class of an object**.

![StackOverflow of a similar class vs class error](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/wdi6aq8wz9cd3p9z1lqc.png)

This problem and its solution lead me to something I've realized over the last two months of Flatiron's Bootcamp: Your issues aren't special. While I panic and freak out over my complications, a quick google search shows they're not that uncommon. 
- I ran into multiple issues as a result of using Corneal to create my file structure (i.e. the version requires a .yml file that was not included, the config.ru includes a command about ActiveRecord::Migrations that I could not solve) but a small thread on my cohort's Slack channel already solved them.
- I knew I had to direct my program to look for view pages (CRUD-following erb files) in the Application Controller, so I added a line ```set :views, 'views'``` and pat myself on the back. Yet when I run shotgun, it told me my corresponding file didn't exist? However after a quick logical backtrace, I realized I needed to be more explicit with my direction and set it to ```'app/views'```.
These issues that I found earth-shattering at the time were actually relatively quick fixes.

The third week of Sinatra reminded me of the second day of Phase 1; I would attend lecture and follow along, feeling like I was understanding about 30% of the material, and then spend hours rereading the labs and rewatching the lessons on 1.5 speed. I was so nervous that I had fallen behind to a place I wouldn't catch up. But around Thursday morning as I was laying out routes for a recipes lab, something clicked. I finally understood the MVC and what every step in a request entails. That lightbulb/eureka moment shuttled me forward and gave me the motivation to catch up and stay positive. 

Like most of my friends in my cohort, I think I have a difficult time realizing and accepting that I actually understand the concepts we discuss. One of our instructors pointed out how we all tend to preface suggestions and correct answers with "Sorry, this might be wrong but.." 
However I feel that as we reach more and more difficult and labor intensive labs and projects, we'll all begin to see that there's no way we're just faking having the knowledge, we are competent and we really do get it.
In the meantime, I'll just keep making silly dungeons and dragons characters based off my dog and trying to understand HTML.

![Character Description of a Gnome Bard with a great tiny booty](https://dev-to-uploads.s3.amazonaws.com/uploads/articles/vfkicv5bzov7sj47npj3.png)