Summary:

Bloccit is an app where people can post, vote on, share, and save links and comments.

Explanation:

This is my first ever Ruby on Rails app that I created while learning about Ruby on Rails at Bloc. I built this app with the help of my mentor, Shannon Bertucci. Ruby and Ruby on Rails are my first coding languages that I learned after I decided to become a web developer/software engineer. In the past, I’ve picked up some HTML and CSS on various Wordpress projects, and that was the extent of my coding knowledge.

Problem:

I’m a filmmaker by trade, and moved out to Los Angeles, to pursue a career in film and television. However, since I grew up in the Silicon Valley, I was very tech savvy and knew my way around computers and software, Hollywood often offered me positions in digital. After 10 years of being offered digital and project management jobs and working alongside developers making much more money than me, I decided I would go back to school and learn how to code. I decided to learn at Bloc.io.

Solution:

While I have picked up HTML and CSS here and there for small projects in the past, I wanted to really understand more than one could learn at a bootcamp coding school. I didn’t just want to learn enough to get me a junior developer job, I wanted to understand it all so that I could build my own apps from scratch, and perhaps run my own teams, too. After some research, I determined that Bloc would be the right school for me because it allowed me to learn part time while keeping a full time job, and it also had a Software Engineering Track. The first third of this track is devoted to Ruby and Ruby on Rails, and Bloccit is the first app that the course materials covers to teach me how to code.

Results:

Bloccit heavily uses Rspec tests to check that all parts of the app are working as intended. It’s pretty thorough and I learned a lot about how to write tests with this app.

Check out the completed app here: Bloccit

Conclusion:

After completing Bloccit, I didn’t exactly feel the most confident about my coding abilities, but I certainly did feel like I had accomplished something large. The app is a pretty extensive one for a first app, and it introduced a wide ranging amount of topics regarding Ruby, Ruby on Rails, Git, Github, Gems, Rspec, MVC (Model Views Controller), CRUD, Authentication, Ajax, API, Heroku, deployment, etc. It was a big app to tackle as my first step into software engineering, and I’m proud of the resulting app I was able to build.