Before I began my first Flatiron portfolio project, I made a promise to myself that I would create realistic and meaningful projects that related to my passions in life. That way, I’d feel enthusiastic and genuine during the development process. Needless to say, my brainstorming process for the second project was short-lived as I quickly came up with the idea to create a web application that tracked sales made on my online shops. Having one place that I could log sales made on my Poshmark, Depop, and Mercari shops was something that I’ve thought about for quite some time, so the Online Sales Tracker Sinatra application was a no-brainer.
Before I began the project, I must admit that I was a bit uneasy about Sinatra and Active Record; however, I can confidently say that the development process helped me to much better understand the material from this section and I believe it really brought everything together for me. Since I wasn’t fully confident beforehand, I thought it’d be best to review Sinatra videos from Flatiron and I ended up following along with Howard’s 9-part lecture series. Watching these videos helped me immensely as I was able to understand the concepts I hadn’t fully grasped during the Sinatra labs. (So, if you are a student who hasn’t yet begun the project and you’re a bit unsure about some of the material, I 10/10 recommend following along with the videos.)
The coding process for my project took almost a week, which was much longer than I’d originally expected. However, my OCD kicked into high gear and I wanted to create a beautiful-looking web application, so the styling portion did take a decent amount of time (along with resolving pesky errors). I began by laying out my MVC model which was based on my User and Sales models. I first created my models and their associations, then I moved onto my controller, and finally the views. There was a lot of trial and error involved in the development of my Online Sales Tracker but I am extremely proud of the end result.
I feel as though I am in a great place with Sinatra and Active Record after completing my project; however, I will say that I’m very excited to move onto Rails as I understand it is easier to build complicated web applications more quickly (AKA even more opportunity to create something amazing!)