Ooo wee. It’s been almost a month since Top Setup was created! I’ve done quite a bit of development since then. It’s starting to look pretty sharp.

Have a look at some of these fancy pictures 😬

I’ve learned a bit more about Rails too. The rails g scaffold feature was really helpful in getting the website up and running quickly. However, I’m beginning to have reservations about using scaffolds. My reason is that it does way too much for you.

I’d say about half of the Rails articles and tutorials I went through start off by teaching Rails with scaffolding. I think it’s great to showcase what Rails can do, but it’s a crutch. It auto-generates the models, controllers, views, and a bunch of other files for you. I found it hard to learn that way. I wasn’t fully understanding what Rails was doing behind the scenes. Thankfully, I had prior MVC knowledge from working with AngularJS.

Don’t get me wrong. I really do appreciate the scaffolding command. It definitely saved me time. However, if you are just starting out with Rails, I’d recommend learning it the “hard” way, especially if you don’t have much experience with MVC frameworks. After all, “one must learn to walk before he can run.” 😝 You’d gain a much better understanding of how the models, controllers, and views are related.

Nonetheless, my biggest struggle in developing this project was figuring out how to get really smooth dynamic layouts. Rails does have the ability for partials, however, it was difficult for me to get really nice transitions and animations. I mean, look at how satisfying the Gyroscope website feels.

Photo Credit

I guess Rails isn’t really meant for that type of work (or *cough* I’m just a Rails noob). I was really used to mobile app development using the React-Native framework that I forgot what web development with just plain JavaScript/jQuery was like! 😅

Regardless, I’m really proud of Top Setup. I’m nervous about releasing it for public use, but I’m excited to see where it’ll end up in the future. If you are interested in poking around, you can visit the site here!