Interesting, exciting, and surprising are not the three words I thought I would use to be describing my project. However, after finishing my project, those are the perfect words for my experience with Sinatra. It was very exciting going into this project to finally get to work with a server and be able to both design and build the MVC from scratch. It was a difficult project to start but once I decided on my topic and made a plan for myself it all flowed together nicely.
I found this project interesting because it was a chance to build an MVC application about something I find amusing. Since I have worked at restaurants for all of my life, I decided on whiskeys. Whiskey is fascinating because there is a large number of different distilleries that make them with rich histories, unique flavor profiles, and creative branding. For this project, I decided to build an MVC while using CRUD that you could view a list of whiskeys and distilleries, and be able to show what whiskeys belonged to a given distillery. I also wanted to make sure my MVC had good flow so you could get to each page seamlessly and was user-friendly.
This project was exciting because for the first time I wasn’t just using my skills in HTML and CSS to design a site, I was building it from the ground up. I got to make the controllers that dictate what happens, build the models that contain the data, and design how the user experiences it all through the views. There were new challenges I faced which also made it exciting. For example, making the relationship has_many and belongs_to relationship between the distilleries and whiskeys. It took some major trial and error to get the right type of form and if/else statements to make the program work. Being able to troubleshoot all my issues and look at errors being produced and find the solutions were very thrilling to me.
This project took me by surprise by how much I enjoyed working on it. I can honestly say I have never had so much fun working on a project before. Even when times got tough or problems arose, I still loved completing this project and can not wait to see what I get to learn next.