When I say the phrase ‘Trust the Process’, I’m not referrring to Joel Embiid, the promising young center on the 76ers, but my own process for creating a project from scratch.
As I started my Rails project, I pondered what I would do differently in the earlier stages. One of my biggest takeaways from Avi’s recent lecture on ‘Learning to Learn’ was to start every project with a plan, so that’s exactly what I did.
The first step was to brainstorm everything I had in my mind for the project onto a piece of paper. From there, I made a summary of how I wanted my app to function. I then took these ideas and adjusted them for each requirement.
After that, I came up with a step by step plan of what I wanted to accomplish. A brief sampling of my plan is below.
- Start with creating a viewable home page
- Install the devise gem for user authentication
- Integrate Facebook Oauth
- Make and migrate database
- Create required models and ensure that they are working
- Include validations for each model
- Create a nested form writing to an associated model (form to create a company and lead)
- Create a nested resource “new” form(create a lead)
- Create a custom attribute writer for the nested form
- Create a scope method
- Integrate validation errors
- DRY my code
The step by step process above allowed me to visualize how my project would grow organically. Although my step by step process was helpful, I was only sucessful because I was granular with how I wanted to achieve each step in my notes.
Without a doubt, this was a difficult project for me to complete and I spent a lot of time getting little things like my show page to work. In the end, I would say the most important thing I did was to plan the project and follow up on it.
As the saying goes, “Trust the Process!”.