I was recently gifted a set of tarot cards and, as I educated myself about what the cards meant and the types of readings available, I started mulling over ways that I could build a digital tarot card application. After coding a bit with vanilla JavaScript, I was curious about using libraries or frameworks to make creating a frontend application a bit easier. For this project, I used React, a library that employs a component-based approach to web development. I paired the React frontend with a Rails API to store data on the backend. I also included Redux to make certain data available where it was needed in the React app. The end result was a simple tarot application where a user could create, save, and analyze 3-card readings. …
Two things I’ve been doing a lot of lately is coding and reading for pleasure. What better way to combine the two than by making a book quotes app using JavaScript?! Enter BookQuotes, an application built with vanilla JavaScript and a Rails API.
What I wanted the app to do
The thought behind the app was simple. To create a repository for some of my favorite quotes from books I’ve read in the past few months. Because I wanted the app to have some CRUD functionality, the user should be able to:
- View all the book quotes currently in the database, including title, author, and genre information along with an image of the book…
Tech plays an important role in the practice of law. In litigation, especially, it is standard practice to use software and/or the web to research cases, to review documents, and to maintain case calendars. But what specific value can a programmer add to a legal team? There is a somewhat new, but growing profession called legal engineering that focuses on the intersection of law and technology. At core, legal engineers are individuals who design and create solutions to make lawyers’ jobs easier. According to Monax.io, “[l]egal engineering is the combination of legal design and software engineering.” …
One of my goals as a new programmer is to write code that is both functional and clear. Clearly written code has the double benefit of being easier for other developers to follow and saving me from typing more than I need to! In Ruby, thanks to the language’s flexibility, there are several ways to meet that goal. In this blog post, I will discuss three: using the “yield” keyword, using curly brackets instead of “do…end”, and using variables judiciously. Each of these aspects of Ruby cut down on fluff and allow programmers to write less verbose, more readable code.
Using the yield keyword
At a high level, the yield keyword take the place of a block of code in Ruby. It literally tells the code to “yield” for the block that is being passed in. So far, I have mostly used the yield keyword to pass a block of code into an enumerable method called on an array or hash object. …
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