Acebook — Day 2

Short Ferret
Nov 5 · 2 min read

Welcome to the continuing adventures of Team Short Ferret Midnight!

Admittedly, this morning was a bit chaotic — two of us had reviews, a service offered by Makers to help prepare us for interviews once we graduate. However, we met briefly before and agreed on the parameters of our Minimum Viable Product(MVP) and made our time estimates. Older and wiser than yesterday, our estimates were much more accurate.

Because teamwork makes the dream work, we split into pairs to tackle today’s tasks(say that three times fast!).

Team 1: Jess and Jay were tasked with setting up the back end of our user services (such as signing up and logging in.) This is when our team learned about the wonders of the gem Devise. Devise is an incredibly powerful gem used for authentication in RoR applications. It’s composed of ten modules that, among other things, allows your user to sign up, login, reset and terminate their account. It also creates databases to store user information.

This gem, amazing as it is, threw several wrenches into our plans today. No member of our team has worked with it before and it was, to be frank, a steep learning curve for all of us. More on this in the conclusion.

Team 2: Nathan and Danielle worked on the front end. Unfortunately, a lot of their work depended on the correct installation of Devise to correctly set up the user interface. So they put their CSS skills to work to set up our Acebook homepage as well as reading up on Devise and how it interacted with the front end of applications. By the end of the day, they were able to create links between pages and create a logout function.

Team 3: Brad and Yas were able to finish all that was left unresolved yesterday, including finishing setting up Travis CI as well as CodeClimate. Completing that, they set to work on creating a user feed — where all posts can be viewed by a user. They also read up on Devise to implement a column for user ids in the database.

As you may have gathered with your keen skills of observation, Devise was the proverbial fly in our ointment today. In our retrospective, we agreed that none of us knew enough about this gem or how it worked. Like any good self-lead learners, we assigned ourselves homework to read up on this gem and how it can help us with our project. We also identified what tasks remain to complete our MVP — our deadline for completion is tomorrow afternoon. We plan to finish our user feed and user profile pages.

Want to learn more about Devise? We found a few useful articles here and here.

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