Rails

My First Rails Project

   Three weeks ago, today I was introduced to Rails.  My initial reaction to rails was not the greatest.  There are a lot of decisions made for you on where things go and it's very confusing.  Lucky for me and everyone else, rails has some of the best docs I've ever seen.  So, after a little hesitation I decided to make a project with rails.  When I say I, I mean a cool team of developers from MakerSquare.  There were 5 of us, two brave souls took on the front end, which we decided to do in Ember (I'll talk about my thoughts on Ember in another post), and two guys and myself took on the back end.

   

   The app has a completely separate front end and back end.  Our back end is an api that our app queries. You can check out the full project here.  The idea behind the project was to query the songkick, meetup, and eventbrite API's based on a location and display them on a map using the mapbox API.  

     The first task I took on was querying the three API's and parsing through their data.  I had a lot of trouble deciding where to put all the logic for this, and eventually landed on putting it all in models, any thoughts on this are welcome.   So far that has been my greatest challenge, deciding where things belong and how much logic should go in certain places.  

    After I finished with the API's I tried to generate some tests using rspec-rails, after spending 2 full days of stagnation, I decided my time would be better spent on the mapbox API and jumped over to the front end.  I'm starting another rails project this week, and I'm hoping to use test driven development, I hope it turns out easier than development driven testing.