I am finally done with the design phase of TopSetup™! Time to start coding! 🤗

I just started learning Ruby on Rails about a month ago to prepare for my new internship at Brand New Box. I’ve used AngularJS which is another MVC framework, but it was JavaScript based. Easy stuff. Rails, on the other hand, is completely new territory since it is Ruby based.

I can’t believe I waited this long to learn it. Rails is a lazy programmer’s dream!

There is quite a bit of a learning curve, but once you get over that hump, you’ll find that it does a lot of the heavy work for you. Here are a couple things so far that I found amazingly helpful:

Generators Rails has a set of rails generate commands that work on the terminal. They generate a lot of code for you so that you don’t have to go through the tedious task of creating and organizing the files yourself. For example, if you need to create a view for a blog post:

$ rails generate scaffold BlogPost title:string content:text

This will not only create the views, but it will also create the model, controller, assets, tests, and routes you might need. Plus, if you think you’ve made a mistake and want to start over, you can just run rails destroy. It will remove all the related files for you.

Migrations One of the things I always hate doing is changing a database schema after it’s already been created. Rails is the bomb dot com with migrations. They are automatically timestamped and versioned. Oh, you’ve created a BlogPosts model and realized your silly tush forgot to include a column for the blog content? No worries. Just run:

$ rails generate migration add_content_to_blogPosts content:text
$ rake db:migrate

Boom! Done.

Check out some screenshots below. Our website is really starting to come along! 😊