Project #3: Building Your Own API
Overview
While your last project taught you how to get started with Ruby, SQL, & Ruby on Rails, this project you'll be building something exciting with Express & Sequelize.
Your instructors will partner you with other classmates to architect, design, and collaboratively build an API of your own design.
This is meant to push you both technically and collaboratively. You will, almost certainly, be joining a development team during your career. Working collaboratively is a learned skill, just like programming. It's important to learn how to work together.
Pro Tips
Process
- Keep user stories small and well-defined. Remember: user stories focus on what a user needs, not what development tasks need accomplishing.
- Write pseudocode before you write actual code. Thinking through the logic first helps.
- Don't hesitate to write throwaway code to solve short-term problems.
- Read the docs for whatever technologies / frameworks / API's you plan to use. (See "RTFM")
Code
- Keep your code DRY and build your APIs RESTful.
- Be consistent with your code style. You're working in teams, but you're only making one app per team. Make sure it looks like a unified effort.
- Commit early; commit often. Don't be afraid to break something because you can always go back in time to a previous version.
- Deploy early; deploy often. Deploy your work as early as possible, even if you don't really have anything completed. Heroku issues always pop up. Don't be caught short just before the submission deadline!
- Name things appropriately. Comment as necessary. Do your naming conventions make sense? Would another developer be able to look at your app and understand what everything is? (See "self-documenting"). Even if it's obvious, comments can help to explain the intent -- the what and why. This allows the next developer to understand the purpose and decide what can be adjusted to achieve the same goal.
- Ensure it is well-formatted. Are you indenting consistently? Can we find the start and end of every div, curly brace, etc? Organizing the hierarchy is key to understanding.
Potential Project Ideas
For this project, work with your team to build a creative product that you actually think someone will want to use. We won't have time to do tons of customer research, but take some time to brainstorm. If you're struggling for ideas, the ones below could help get you started.
Bucketli.st
Besides finishing WDI, you surely have one or two things you'd love to do with your life. Let's get 'em on paper! You could integrate with a third-party location-based API to allow users to search for a location or venue to add to their bucket list items.
Survey App
Imagine sending out a survey to everyone in the class: what should we eat for lunch today? Or 1-5, how well did you understand what we just learned? It would be even more awesome if it were realtime, so you could see answers pouring in as they're submitted.
Hello, Comments
Imagine the benefits of having an API where you could embed comments into any website you want. They could even update in realtime if you wanted, so that you'd never have to refresh the page. CMS providers across the world could quit writing code from scratch and just embed your widget instead.
Evaluation and Submission
One member of the group must submit an issue on the pbj-project3-gallery repository by 12:30 pm, Friday, August 28th.
See the requirements for the contents of the submission here.
Feedback will be returned to you by 6:00 pm, Wednesday, September 2nd.
Note that instructors will not be grading on a numbered scale this time. Projects will simply be either "meets", "does not meet", or "exceeds expectations".
Attendance
Attendance will be at 12:00pm on Friday. Groups are otherwise welcome to work outside of GA at their collective discretion.
Support
Instructors will be checking Github issues to respond to technical questions.
Additionally, each group may request 20 minutes of in-person instructor support 3 times over the course of the project. These may be redeemed anytime during business hours: simply Slack the instructor and they'll come as quickly as possible. However, unused minutes don't "roll over".
For existential questions, and/or those regarding expectations, instructors may be reached via Slack at any time, inside and outside of business hours (although they may be somewhat slower to respond outside of business hours).