w8d2 - The chattr around town...

    No more pairs, no more instructions (not explicit ones at least). Today marked the beginning of a new phase at app/Academy, one in which we finally get to build on all of the knowledge that we’ve spent the last 7 weeks accumulating. They’re finally pulling the training wheels off, and it’s an exciting time as we figure out how to keep pedaling. For my final project, I decided to build chattr, a clone of Twitter. It’s a site I’m very familiar with, and I thought it would also provide a good showcase for everything that we’ve learned. I also think I should be able to put my own little spin on it, so overall I felt it was a good choice.

    On Day One, I polished off user authentication, which I started the night before. Then I spent some time writing unit tests for my User model, using shoulda-matchers, which was sooooo much cleaner and easier to write than regular rspec. Once I had that out of the way, I moved onto my Post model (my version of Tweets), giving users the ability to make posts. The last thing I did before leaving today was figure out how to link up the follower/following relationship, which was trickier than I initially thought. I had to link two Users together using a Join table that keeps track of user_ids and follower_ids. Basically doing a self join through a separate join table. The actual logic was not that difficult, it was keeping track of the similar names that was tricky, but after renaming my fields and associations a few times, I came up with something that worked for me.

    Day Two will be all about configuring the post feed, and once that’s finished I will have arrived at my MVP (minimum viable product), which means I can start doing just a *tiny* bit of styling. Until then, the site will just have to suffer from a bad case of the 90’s.