I started with Ruby basics, built up to Sinatra and will be digging into full-fledged Rails apps with Databases and React in a few weeks. First, I needed to get the basics down of just basic Object Oriented Programming concepts. I also needed to really sit down and get a good basic grasp of Vanilla Javascript.

Concepts such as “truthy” and “falsy”, objects, classes, variables, loops, iteration over Enummerables such as arrays and hashes. Finally, applying all that to being able to access data from APIs and JSON files via a fetch call.  This is  most definitely a  coding road that requires many, many hours of reading, iteration, repetition, error debugging (many of the errors are  difficult to understand until I get familiar with the error syntax and what the errors are telling me). The mere act of debugging in  Javascript using debugger and node, or debugging in Ruby using binding.pry when trying to figure out where my Sinatra app went so wrong… those are the moments where I have learned most. When things are not working in my code and I finally have that moment of resolution where I figure out the bug; those “Aha!” are moments are crucial and so valuable.

To date I have been working hard to put all of this together:

• Ruby, Sinatra, RSpec and Capybara test writing.
• Dynamic routing in Sinatra as a prelude to Dynamic Routing in React.
• React fundamentals such as dumb components, props, followed by React
• Advanced topics such as  Stateful components, classes, using the fetch API to access data, shuttling form payloads to update JSON files, validation for these same forms

Will be digging into Databases and data persistence in React pretty soon!

This was a very quick and  slim overview of  what I have been tackling, but I hope to go a bit deeper into these topics in future posts.