Makers Week 9: The Acebook pt 2
Tags: makers, ruby, rails
Published: 2020-01-27 21:15:28

Weekly Goal:

*Can you use high-quality processes to build a project in a team?*

So it's now week two of the Acebook challenge and I think things are going quite well. We got all of the original requirements done like the sign-in and log in etc. So we are on the way to having some new interesting features and hopefully, by the end, you'll be mistaking it for Facebook.

You can check out Acebook here if you’re interested:
*http://acebook-irrelevant-pests.herokuapp.com/*

Day 1

So I started the week doing some CSS to make the site look pretty. A somewhat tedious job at times but it needs to be done. So I spent the day touching up the site doing maintenance. I was able to look around and have a look at the uploading photo feature which was using Active Storage. Active Storage is something I'd like to look into more because I feel like it could be very useful.

Day 2

Day two I got to work with the photos I had to apply all relevant photos to the correct page. This wasn't too bad it was just a matter of getting the info from the database. I used the where function in Active Record to get all the photos by the params id. Then I moved onto looking into Rails syntax for refactoring which awkward to get used to but that's never stopped me before.

Day 3

This day was an annoying one because I delved further into refactoring our application.html.erb file to use the Rails syntax. That was quite a task because we had done a lot using HTML. but after realising I could get our application file down to a couple of lines using an HTML helper file it had to be done. I had a lot of trouble trying to concat the content tags though but after some trial and effort and a lot of googling, I got it. It works something like this *"concat content_tag(:div, { 'your_block' }". It wasn’t all bad though because at the start of the challenge we talked about implementing the Konami code(UP, UP, DOWN, DOWN, LEFT, RIGHT, LEFT, RIGHT, B, A). So I got around to adding final touched on that, it's like our own little easter egg but you'll have to put in the code to see what it does.

Day 4

I did some pairing on day four. We started pairing on AWS so we could store images more effectively. AWS was probably the most tedious job mainly because none of us had experience using it before so we spent a lot of the day looking it up how it worked. So we couldn’t get it set up that day which was a little annoying.

Day 5

This was our final day to work on our projects. Our demo was at 3 o'clock which means we had less time than every other day. We split off into teams of three and two. I was on the team of two, although I use the word "team" loosely because we were sat together doing different things but checking in regularly just and working together quite a bit. The team I was on we were working on AWS still but it was throwing a lot of errors when we deployed it. Unfortunately, because we were tight on time we couldn’t implement AWS so we had to revert it to the way it was before. That was a bit disappointing but we did get some success with cleaning up the live chat. We were able to put it into a scroll box and add the text input to the nav-bar. We also added a feature that scrolls to the bottom of the scroll box after a message is submitted so you'd see all the most up to date messages.

Summary

We got a lot of work done this week but I think we should’ve spent Friday preparing for the demo by doing a screen recording. We did a live demo which was fine because nothing went wrong but a screen recording would've been smoother and safer because we'd be able to fix anything that went wring and re-record it. We also didn’t get AWS implemented and wasted a lot of time on it on Friday. But the main thing is that the site was working and was bug-free, I also learned a lot of rails.