In React, there are many methods that allow classes to run when a component mounts and unmounts. These methods are called Lifecycle Methods. Among the myriad of Lifecycle Methods, one of the most important is render(). Interestingly enough, it is the only required method for Component Classes to run, as it is what allows your JSX to be visible in your program.
Writing this final blog is definitely bittersweet, however I am so happy to finally say that I have made it to the finishline! Flatiron has taught me so much about myself and how much I am able to push myself to learn new things.
For my final Flatiron project, I decided to create a program where users can share photos of their favorite home dishes with the ingredients they use and directions on how to prepare the dish.
For my fourth project, I decided to make an application that organizes my tiktok likes into specific categories. As a user that spends countless hours of the night on the app, I like way more videos than I’ll ever admit. Because of this, whenever I go back to try and find a video that I liked a few days ago I’d have to scroll so much to find it.
My project is a dog walking application that allows users to sign up, log in, and create walks for dogs listed under their profile. The users can also leave comments on walkers that they have used, and these comments can be viewed by any logged in user.
I think the most complex part of this project was implementing nested forms and ensuring that the views were different based on the params that were passed in. It was as if once I thought I got the hang of it, another error came up that I had to spend hours figuring out. Thankfully, going over the labs time and time again allowed me to really understand nested forms and showing different views.
I was also a bit iffy about the relationships between my objects. It always amazes me how active record helpers really makes relationships super simple. For example, my users are not directly related to walks because they’re not the ones involved in the walk. Their dogs are. So rather than implementing a ` user id in my walk table, I created a has_many relationship in my user model that relates the user and the walk through the user's dog has_many :scheduled_walks, through: :dogs, source: :walks`
One thing that I get very nervous about is keeping my code DRY. As I move on with each project, it seems that it becomes easier to do this. The use of partials and helpers really eased my anxiety about this. So rather than having a huge view file with if-else statements all over the place, it’s much nicer to have a simple view that renders partials so that your code is a lot cleaner.