DEV Community: Richard Dewey Hammers

Getting through a Bootcamp

Richard Dewey Hammers — Tue, 19 Oct 2021 20:59:09 +0000

I did it! I have finished the full course with Flatiron getting through all 5 mods! I came in knowing nothing about ruby to fully understanding it and growing my knowledge of JavaScript. What next? I'm now working on a new project taking my first project which was a ruby cli and giving it a user UI with React. I will be pulling from a starwars API to take in data to display to the user to info about 6 different categories.

I want to take my knowledge I learned from React in mod5 and grow on that with hooks. I want to keep learning and build more projects to keep code fresh in my mind. I want to start learning Node.js as a backend server as its liter to use over something like Rails. I also might want to pick up python also. I can't wait to see what life throughs at me next!

Rails + React

Richard Dewey Hammers — Mon, 27 Sep 2021 14:27:26 +0000

I was really excited to start this project as it was going to put everything that I learned in the last 10 months from Ruby and JavaScript all together into one project. I decided to really test myself by making a budgeting app that I would use myself. This project turned out to be a lot harder then I thought it would be. In all it toke me about 10 days to finish the whole project. The app starts off asking the user to either signup or login. From there you have the main app where the transactions and budging takes place. The user can also head over to his own profile page and either read through his info or edit his username or email.

the hardest thing that I had to overcome in this project was dealing with my rails and the belongs to and has many. The was I set up the transaction and budget model was that a transaction belongs to a budget and a budget has many. The transaction model also had its on account, which was a string with a given name that the transaction belonged too. The problem come in when I wanted to have a transaction without linking a budget to it as it would either add income or outcome from the account itself. Rails did not like this as it had to have an ID to be created, so after six hours I came up with creating a join table through a model to be created if there was a budget to be linked with a transaction.

In all I really feel like this project has really strengthen me in my knowledge of Ruby and JavaScript.

JavaScript Frontend

Richard Dewey Hammers — Wed, 21 Jul 2021 15:42:43 +0000

Moving into more of the frontend side of things using JS as a frontend language besides using rails erb I can see how I'm able to make a more friendly user experience. Even though I can add a button with rails erb and have it load a new page, with JS I can make it Fetch JSON from a rails api and give me back that info to use without having to have the user wait for the page to load. With that same power I can also Post, Edit and Delete through Fetch and being able to update the DOM without a refresh. This makes the user experience friendlier and they don't have to sit there waiting for the page to refresh.

The hardest part of working on this webpage was trying to figure out how I wanted to structure my app. I first started by making everything as a class then calling each method on the main file. But that got really messy and those classes served no function besides calling class methods. So I got rid of all the classes and only made two classes Task and Item which served a purpose to store each Object that was fetched from the Rails API. Next I built out generator functions that would return back some raw html to render a Task or a Item to the DOM to clean up the code in the main file.
In the end the code looks a lot cleaner now and a lot more readable .

I can't wait till I get to learn React next which will take a lot of the pain of writing out all the code myself to interact with the DOM and focus more on the meat of the app.

Getting into rails

Richard Dewey Hammers — Wed, 26 May 2021 15:05:42 +0000

When I started to program with ruby on rails I couldn't believe how easy it was to get my app up a running! I was able to flesh out my final project for phase 3 in little to 2 to 3 days. I love how rails is designed so all you have to worry about is getting your database set up then working on your models, controller and views. Rails even has a way to generate all this in one command which makes everything go even faster!.

In phase 4 I will start to learn JavaScript and React in phase 5 which will really help my front end development. Try to build out my front end for this project I was just using the normal means and I can see how using those frameworks will really help strengthen by development. I did have to use a little JavaScript so a user can edit there comment on the post without being redirected to a edit page.

Building my first website

Richard Dewey Hammers — Mon, 22 Mar 2021 15:19:58 +0000

I got through phase 2 learning Ruby Sinatra and I just finished my final project, building out a CRUD. I decided to make my website theme on anime. The user can create a new post by searching up a anime name and then add there review, current eps and there rating. They then can either edit there post or delete it. I watch a lot of anime, so I though it be cool to be able to make a list of all the anime's that I have seen in the past and that I'm currently watching.

What I have learned from going through this phase was, I have a better understand on how databases work and how to use them. Using Active Record with Ruby really helps take a lot of stress out of having to write out all the sql. I also got a better understanding on url paths GET and POST with PATCH And DELETE. I will be moving into Ruby on Rails in my next phase which will really help take a lot of the set up out that I had to do with Sinatra.

Building my first Ruby CLI

Richard Dewey Hammers — Mon, 25 Jan 2021 17:07:52 +0000

After about two months learning everything I can about ruby I have come to grow a love for it. I love how simple the programing langue is to write out and how easy it to read as I code. I had to build a CLI gem for my final project for phase one at flatiron. I went ahead I decided to build a Star Wars lookup anything you want cli where a user can choose from a list of 6 categorizes and then get back a list of names to choose from within that category. Next it will print out all the info on that name than the user chosen from. Next the user can go back to the start or list out all the names again. I did this by getting data from the SWAPI api.

One of the hardest challenges that I had to over come was finding a way to not let the user break out of the second loop once they get into listing all the names if they enter in the wrong thing or if the wanted to list all the names again. I over came this with setting a variable to nil and the loop will break once that variable is set to true. I first tried to set it to exit like I did on the first loop but it will cause a edge case where once you type in exit in the second loop you will break into the first loop resting it to ask the user for there input again and not exiting out of the cli.

This was a really fun project to build out and really helped me learn how to over come some challenges that I had to over come. I'm really exited to work on my next big project on Sinatra which will be in the next two months from now!

The reason I want to become a software engineer

Richard Dewey Hammers — Mon, 07 Dec 2020 19:54:12 +0000

The reason I want to become a software engineer is because I want to get a job that I love and that I can put my creative side to use. I'm married with a son and want to support them as well as set a good example to my son that through education and hard work you can succeed. How did I grow to love to code? I got interested in coding through learning some basics in game building through a online video class on C++ and C#. I then thought that maybe I should start to learn full stack web development and learned HTML, CSS and Javascript.

I wanted to take on a new challenge and put all the skills that I have learned over the years into good use by taking on a bootcamp and scoring that job at the end of the road. Why did I decided to take on a coding bootcamp? Learning with a cohort and having a teacher there too support me on my road to code is something that I wont get out of self teaching. I love the structure that a online coding bootcamp has to help me grow to the point I got the job.