Bootstrap out, Bulma in!
A Meetup.com-like app as a Belt exam reviewer PLUS a new CSS framework

Tomorrow is my final Belt Exam at “the Dojo”, so naturally today was “belt reviewer day”. The exam is to build a Ruby/Rails app in 4.5 hours and deploy it to AWS, so getting the belt reviewer right is important. (I’m still not sure how I feel about Rails and that’s probably irrelevant, but I just had to throw that in.)
So, to prepare for the exam, we were given a wireframe of an events app (kind of like meetup.com), and that’s what I spent the day building. This app is a good review because it has some complex database relationships. For example, each user can host and event, and they can also attend an event. But wait, events can also have many users, so yes, this is a many to many problem with some sprinkles. Rails definitely has some great methods to help with this, but as usual, is the Rails way or the highway so you’ve got to get that syntax correct. It was fun to create the join and leave event features and I learned a lot today.
I really hate when my apps look bad, and at times I instinctively try to style my app too early in the development. (I’ve gotten better at waiting until the main functionality is built, so that’s good.) Plugging in a CSS framework helps to alleviate some of the pain of an ugly app, without spending too much time doing styling. But, when the framework starts causing the pain? It’s time to say goodbye to it. Bootstrap was really starting to get stale so I knew I needed something new, simple and fresh. (I really like Materialize, and my portfolio website uses it, but it has problems with select tags which this project is heavy in.)
Enter Bulma! Yes, Bulma. Bulma is a really simple and fresh framework based on Flexbox. It’s features are not very different to other CSS frameworks, but it’s super fresh, and that’s what I needed. So Bulma is my new go to, at least for now.
Here is today’s app, with very brief styling using Bulma:



I am looking for an opportunity to join and contribute on a tech team, and I’d love to chat. I’m on Twitter, LinkedIn, Medium, Github or plain old email @ leibelhecht@gmail.com. My Portfolio is at leibelhecht.com

