Week 9 at LEARN Academy
This is part 10 in a series about my experience at LEARN Academy coding bootcamp in San Diego, CA. You can read why I decided to go to bootcamp here, and also catch up with my thoughts on Week One, Week Two, Week Three , Week Four, Week Five, Week Six, Week Seven and Week Eight.
API’s, Gems and AJAX week.
I can’t believe this was the last week of structured learning. This past 9 weeks have gone by so fast, it’s been a blur. Our lessons this week were applied to an apartment finder app, which we were able to deploy on Heroku at the end of the week.
We began the week learning the Google Maps API and how to incorporate the map into a Rails application. I was happy to see my old friends JavaScript and jQuery again. It was a bit of a struggle to get things up and running, but the satisfaction of seeing your map up and functioning is worth all of the frustration.
Once our map was up and running, we began adding gems to the application. I’m so glad that gems exist! It’s great to be able to add functionality to your app without starting at square one. The first gem we added was Paperclip, and we were able to add photos to our apartment listings as well as to our users. We then added search functionality with the Textacular gem. I’m so amazed at how simple these gems were to add to the app.
We continued adding new features to our apartment finder by adding a Twitter login feature, and then moved on to assign permissions to our different types of users – apartment owners, apartment seekers and the app admin.
We finished up the week by wrapping up any challenges we were unable to finish and then deploying the app to Heroku. My partner’s and my app ran into some technical difficulties with Paperclip images not showing up as well as some other little bugs, but it felt really amazing to have a real functioning app up and running in real life.
You can check out the app at https://kandl-aptapp.herokuapp.com/
It’s crazy to think that we have all of the tools we need to move forward to our group projects. I’m really excited to see what my team will be and which project I’ll be working on. I have heard some of the ideas and I have submitted my own idea, and I am equally excited about working on all of them!
P.S. Last week’s Wildlife Tracker App is up and running on Heroku thanks to my partner last week Amy Schools.