If you would have asked me at any point of my childhood what I wanted to be when I grew up, I would have told you Video Game Designer. I loved drawing levels, creating my own characters, and absolutely obsessing over the few video games my strict parents would let me play. They amazed and inspired me. I even dabbled in some light game design in middle school. They were my passion. Making a website for collecting game consoles was an obvious choice for how I wanted to tackle this project, and I had a lot of fun doing it.
This was the first time in my Flatiron course where I got to work with CSS. In college, I took a Web 1 class which first introduced me to CSS. I’m an artsy person. I love color, design and order. As enjoyable as I find programming and the problem solving involved, graphic design and front-end work has my heart. It was so fun to not only make something smart but to make it look pretty. OK, I had much more fun with the pretty part.
My application allows users to collect an assortment of game consoles—organized by name, release year and manufacturer—but any guests can view all consoles on the website and who owns them. Thanks to the sinatra-flash gem (which I am now a big fan of), helpful pop-up messages guide users in the account creation process as well as when they have successfully added a console.
This portfolio project gave me great experience with styling, forms, database management and, of course, Sinatra. I’m very grateful to Brian Emory for creating the Corneal gem which gave me the basic framework for my project.