The Story of Oh Snap! #civictech
In March of this year, I found myself back on the job market again. A big part of my job search strategy is to network as much as possible, so I began attending several technology-oriented meetups in South Florida. I noticed that Code for Fort Lauderdale was hosting a meetup at Ultimate Software. They are one of the top-rated employers in the nation, and I was curious about what it would be like to work there, so off I went.
I met the organizers, Rob Davis and Ryan Gates. They are very enthusiastic about the use of technology to help improve the community, and their passion for this shows. They really seek to inspire members of the group to contribute to the group’s projects or come up with projects of their own.
At that time, I was going through Colt Steele’s “Web Developer Bootcamp” on Udemy, and had just made it to the JavaScript portion of the course. As I started working on that section, I felt like my time would be better spent just building something in JavaScript instead of watching videos.
My family and I are receiving food stamp benefits while I am unemployed. The state of Florida provides you with a debit card which you can use to buy groceries. You get a certain dollar amount put on the card each month.
We were using the card and everything was fine until the funds were all used up. I had no idea when more money would be placed on the card. I assumed that it would automatically refill on the first of the month, but this was not the case.
I looked on the back of the debit card, and it said to go to ebtedge.com to check your balance and get other relevant information. I logged onto the web site using my account information and found a web page that would tell me when funds would be renewed.
I was presented with brief instructions and a spreadsheet that you could use to determine the date. In a nutshell, you had to find your case number (which is different from the number on your food stamp debit card), reverse the 8th and 9th digits of that number, then look up that number in the spreadsheet to get the day of the month that funds are placed on your card each month. Simple, right? Simply ridiculous!
The good thing about these instructions is that they are essentially detailed specifications that a programmer might use to write code.
The code I came up with definitely is not the best. I wrote it while attending the Broward Ruby Brigade Saturday Code Meetup at General Provision, a co-working space in Fort Lauderdale. By doing a bit of Googling, copy/pasting and editing, I was able to get it working. One of my sons, Doran, is a Computer Engineering major at UCF and he helped me as well.
I used Plunker to test it out and to format the code neatly. I used Milligram, which is a lightweight CSS framework, to make the site look like an Android app. I also used the CSS from bestmotherfucking.website for additional styling. I have access to a LAMP server that I can host web sites on, so I used FireFTP to upload it there and purchased an inexpensive domain name, ohsnap.site, from NameCheap. My computer teacher and mentor, Richard Piasecki, runs the LAMP server and configured the domain name to point to it.
I presented the project at a Code for Fort Lauderdale meetup held at Broward College and was surprised that it got a positive response from the audience. One gentlemen wished he had a program like this available to him in the past. He used to work in retail and had customers get upset with him because he could not tell them when funds would be put on their card — only that they were out of money.
I also presented it at Broward Ruby Brigade and got a lot of good feedback from Stephen Witte, a software developer at TRIM Agency. He told me I should not use myFunction as a function name and wondered why I didn’t store a variable as a numeric instead of a string.
So, what lies in the future for this mini-project? Certainly I would like to incorporate the suggestions given during the code review. Ultimately, I would like to get it into the hands of the company that created the ebtedge.com website so it can replace their existing web page. Either that, or find a way to let people who could benefit from using it know that it exists.
My hope is that this blog post is a first step towards that goal. I also hope this post inspires beginners who are interested in coding to get involved in their community and work with other like-minded individuals to use the power of programming to solve problems.
Written by: Paul Senior
P.S. Interested in doing more? Find a local brigade near you! 💻 🇺🇸 👍
P.P.S. To see the site in action without a case number simply enter nine numerical digits and hit enter.
