Have you ever walked around NYC looking for a place to eat? Have you ever wished there was a way to find the health inspection info for restaurants near you? Well, now you can do that using Filth Finder, a React app with a Rails backend. This application fetches data from the NYC Open Data API. I recently took the opportunity to rewrite one of the components using React Hooks!

My goal here is to share my experience attending Flatiron’s Online Web Development Program from October 2017 to April 2018. A lot of people ask about this, so here is my long answer. My answer will cover the following: curriculum mentoring services access to help from technical people career services pricing structure Curriculum The greatest value I received was having structured and time-sensitive goals to focus on for six months.

Git gets a lot easier the more you just dig in and use it. There’s an inflection point on learning anything, where you can move on from just the basic fundamentals of understanding something to understanding something so well that you can start to think more creatively while using the new skill. Think of each commit as a a friendly ghost that you can conjure up to learn about the code’s past.

Writing tests before you develop may help you write better code. I didn’t understand the full extent of the benefits of TDD until I actually wrote tests myself and then incrementally wrote code based on those tests. This post will share how I got started writing tests in Rails. I will walk you through getting started by creating a simple Rails API and then writing a test that determines whether or not requesting a specific resource will result in rendering the data you want.

One thing to consider when you start developing an application is the organization of your git repos. Monorepo is an organization structure where all of your code is one repo, and multi-repo involves organizing code across multiple repos. When I built Greenthumb Gardens, I used something similar to the monorepo structure because I nested the client in a folder inside of the Rails API. Typically, monorepos are a bunch of different high level folders in the same repo.

I recently took the plunge into learning CSS animations, and I’m so glad I did. I had so much fun learning how to add an animation to one of my cat illustrations, and I’m excited to share it. This post will explain the basics of CSS animations, as well as how to add a floating animation to an image. Let’s get started For context, I added this animation to a blog application built in Rails using ERB to display content to the client.

Conditional statements (if…else) execute code if a condition is true. If the condition is false, another statement is executed. In JavaScript, you can also use a switch statement to evaluate multiple conditions against the same expression. This post will explain when you should use a switch and how it works. The code below generates a random number and executes a statement based on 2 conditions: either the number is greater than 500 or it’s not.

I’m working on a Rails app for nonprofit management that features multi-tenancy. This means that a single instance of the application will support multiple isolated users. Today, we’ll discuss how to configure multi-tenancy using the Apartment library with sessions. What is Multi-tenancy? Multi-tenancy is a type of design architecture that allows an application to run multiple clients on one system. So, you can have multiple customers (customer == tenant == nonprofit administrative organization) logging into the same software.

I’m building an open source rails app aimed at empowering nonprofits to efficiently manage government grants. It’s called Theodora 👑. Large nonprofits often have a structure where one adminstrative organization distributes grant funds across multiple smaller nonprofits. This structure is (sort of) similar to how fast food 🍔 chain businesses are affiliates of a central corporate office. This post will share the steps I took toward creating Theodora as an open source project.

Recursion is the computer science concept of solving a problem where the solution depends on solutions to other instances of the same problem. With recursion, you can take a complex problem with multiple repeating steps, break it down into one small problem, and then feed the solutions of the small problems back into the original function. In order to avoid an infinite loop, you include a base case that signals your function to exit the loop and begin taking all of the solutions to the smaller problems and unwinding them to reach your final solution.