Sometimes Getting in Over Your Head is the only way to learn to swim. A rails project journey.

Soo, as I get ready to do my project review for my Flatiron Rails project I find myself in way over my head, but I think I could probably swim across the shallow end of the pool.

As with all of my previous projects in this course I wanted to make sure my project was related to a real-world problem that I could understand well and tackle from a coding standpoint. I struggle quite a bit with the curriculum in some places, not because I can’t understand the coding concepts, but I can’t get my head around some of the contrived scenarios that are shoe horned into the lessons that are trying to be taught(no grief here for the creators, just a personal point of fact). So instead of trying to look at the requirements and construct a project around them I wanted to solve a problem and hope that the resolution met requirements.

It turned out this meant instead of two to three models, I ended up with 5. This meant instead of meeting the minimum requirements around types of associations they were doubled and trippled and even more complex associations and dependencies had to be added. The application of the concepts as shown in video walk throughs didn’t necessarily apply and there was a wide world of things that simply had not yet been covered.

This led to roughly 30 days of coding vs. probably what would have been a week or so and to the potential need for me to file for an extension :(……I think it was probably worth it.

First, there is something very gratifying about solving a real-world problem, that with some additional work could actually be applied to my benefit. Not the same feeling when ticking boxes on the spec.md sheet for me.

Second, I went into this with a very shaky understanding of many or the required concepts. I don’t know that having simply ticking those boxes would have gotten me to a place where I could do more than verbally walk through the mechanics and and delivery mostly a replication. I’m probably still standing on soggy crumbly ground, but its a world away from where I was when this began. The additional complexities associated to the more complex outcomes needed are what forced me to get there.

Third, this required a ton of stuff that was outside the curriculum. Some of the full time students might look at it and think…”not really that much”, but for a student who routinely gets to spend just enough time to keep moving forward in the lessons, this is allot. Allot enough that I feel pretty confident in being able to solve this real-world problem even though there is a ton of work left to be done for it to be in a working form.

Always be ready to jump in the deep end, the fear of drowning is a powerful motivator ;)