This is the first of a three part series about the insights I gained while building my first AngularJS application using Ruby on Rails in the backend. This particular post is about the Rails back end and retrieving JSON data. There are almost certainly better ways to do some of these things, but this is how I did it and what I learned. Building a Ruby on Rails application often involves some “magic”, as it’s...

In the last blog post, I talked about building a basic Rails app and some of the things I learned along the way. Today, I’m going to look at what happened along the way when I added a few AJAXy things to that app. Getting started with AJAX on a Rails app can be a bit confusing, but once you learn a few things, it should be easier to figure stuff out. One of the...

If you ever build even a simple web application, one thing you’ll have to figure out is how to display error messages to a user. My experience with errors has mostly been within the context of using Ruby on Rails and ActiveRecord, specifically validations. ActiveRecord Validations are a bunch of helper methods which ensure that “bad” data doesn’t make it into a database. As a programmer, I can even create my own custom validations which...

As I continue along the process of becoming a web developer, I am constantly watching videos about various programming concepts. There are so many lectures, talks, and podcasts coming out every day, I kept wanting to keep track of my notes and various info about these videos. Since my last post discussed my first Ruby gem, and I’m learning to become a web developer, it makes sense that the next step in my learning would...

As a student of Flatiron School’s online campus, Learn Verified, the first real project you set forth alone to create is a Ruby Gem. There are several basic requirements to complete this project which include a few things like building a command line interface for the gem and data for the gem must be provided via scraping or public API. In this post I’m going to talk about how I decided what to make and...