For the second assessment, I created a simple Content Management System, a.k.a. a CRUD (Create Read Update Delete) app.
What I found most interesting about Sinatra was the way in which it was introduced into the curriculum. Sandwiched between Rack and Rails, Sinatra offers a solid introduction to creating simple, lightweight web applications. Web development can be an overwhelming project, but luckily, there are universally accepted standards that every web application should adhere to. For example, every web app should be able to provide routing services for handling client requests. Web frameworks are an excellent means of abstracting the common patterns and features of web applications, thereby allowing the developer to focus on defining the logic of the application rather than building each individual component of it.
I am proud to announce that I have officially completed my very first CLI gem using Object-Oriented Ruby! Like many other students, I was initially intimidated about creating an entire project from scratch. To help me get through the first stages of coder’s block, I watched the walkthrough videos provided by Learn, which turned out to be an immense help.
My favorite part about this segment was being able to abstract the code instead of relying on its literal representation. If we were to draw an analogy, the literal representation requires drivers to know everything that goes on under the hood of a car, including all of the engine’s components. An abstraction of this low-level model, on the other hand, is simply turning on the vehicle’s ignition from the driver’s seat. We are not required to know all the nitty-gritty details of how a car starts running from ignition; rather, we only need to focus on being able to start and drive the car. In the programming world, this abstraction is a key feature in object-oriented programming (OOP), as opposed to the lower level procedural programming paradigm explained earlier.
The trickiest part that I came across when learning HTML5 was browser compatibility issues. This problem was covered in the last two lessons of the HTML5 series: HTML5 Media and HTML5 Semantic Elements.