First team meeting

This afternoon (and evening) we had our first official team meeting. Matt S. gave us a crash course in Ruby on Rails (mainly Fernando and I since Matt F. knows Ruby and Rails fairly well it seems). It was really good to see the connections between the various components (such as models, views, controllers, and routes) in the context of the basic application framework. Doing tutorials is helpful but it cannot really prepare you for actually starting an application from scratch. I took lots of notes while Matt was giving his mini-lecture and I learned a lot of shortcuts, conventions, and Rails commands that will make my life easier when I start working on a part of the project. However, I'm sure that when I actually sit down in front of the application and start working on my first part of the app, it's going to be interesting! Fernando and I have agreed to meet during the first few weeks so we can maybe do some pair programming since neither of us has ever worked in RoR before. We can help each other out as we're starting to work on our parts of the app.

During the meeting we also drew out the basic design of the database and created a simple storyboard that outlines the functionality and structure of each page in the app. This also allowed us to better fill out the database design and figure out our tasks for the next few weeks. Initially, Fernando and I will be in charge of creating the profile page for the users. Each of us will work on certain parts of this page, such as the profile picture, statistics, and current challenge. Overall, storyboarding the app was really helpful since it gave us all a better idea of what we needed to accomplish in order to finish this app by the end of the semester.

So, in the next few weeks, I'll really be diving into Rails. It is certainly a change from the programming languages that I do know. For instance, I was able to pick up the basics of C# (and even VB) since they are fairly similar to Java. However, Rails is on another level (not as crazy as Haskell or Scheme, but still....). As I've mentioned in previous posts, keeping track of all the folders, component connections, and naming conventions is tricky, though this should get easier as I start working through code. Hopefully, within the next week, I can report that I have been able to successfully implement some RoR "in the real world".