“What is the best way to develop a website?”
The past couple weeks have really flown by. On week eight we had our hackathon weekend, where each demo day group worked around the clock. My group, Friend Karma, set a goal to have the MVP (minimum viable product) completed by the end of the weekend. We weren’t able to completely finish the MVP, but we did make giant strides in the overall development. It’s incredible what a small group can accomplish in forty-eight hours when there is a mutual goal in sight.
In class we learned about installing and setting up awesome Rails gems.. The gem private_pub, utilizes JQuery and Ajax to let each chat-user view all the updates on a given page without refreshing the browser. The gem OAuth enables users to sign in via Twitter. In our app Friend Karma, we are using the gem Sorcery for authentication. We are also using the gem public_activity which simplifies the process of creating a news feed of all recent activities.
These last four weeks have helped me realize how much there is to learn. In the end of Learn to Program, Chris Pines, mentions “Tim Toady” or TMTOWTDI, which stand for “There’s more than one way to do it.” There are almost an infinite amount of possible ways you could develop the same exact website. The first task is getting from point A to point B. Break a few eggs, use a few gems, or don’t, get to MVP. Then and only then, ask yourself, “What is a better way to develop this website?”