I have enjoyed every section of Flatiron’s full-stack bootcamp so far - except for the SQL section. Why? SQL is (relatively) easy to understand! It’s just a big spreadsheet (more or less), and not even a very fancy one at that! Or so I thought.
Up until that point, I had been diving deeper into Object Oriented Programming every day, and even though some of the more abstract concepts took a minute to wrap my head around, I really felt like my understanding of Ruby and its potential were growing every day.
SQL, on the other hand, felt too basic - too rote - so I was happy to check that off the list for the moment and move on.
Then it all started coming together with Sinatra (plus ORMs and ActiveRecord, of course). I started to see how all of these tools work together to create a dynamic, flexible, reliable program.
As I built my Sinatra portfolio project - a travel wishlist that allows user to add destinations to their wishlist and track where they’ve been - I could see how SQL is deceptively simple. Each user of my app has his own data, and it’s easily accessible, thanks to ids. Which then allows the app to present the data in much more interesting ways (move a destination from wishlist to visited, add notes on who you’d like to go with - then update with who actually went on the trip, sort a list by most recent journey, and more).
The further I get in this bootcamp, the more I see how each language and gem and tool I learn works with everything I’ve learned before to create a more robust environment for me as a developer, and thus the user.