JavaScript and Rails Portfolio Project

Posted by Kevin O'Brien on October 12, 2019

For my JavaScript and Rails final project, I decided to try to tackle and find a solution for an issue that had plagued my college career: having to write down new equation sheets for every single test that I took. Having to go through and locate every equation to write down from a textbook, and find a way to fit it all onto one sheet of paper was often a nightmare. So for my project, I decided to work on a web application that would do the hard work for me. The idea was that there would be a list of different fields of study, and within those fields you would have a list of equations, and the ability to add or remove from the equations as you see fit. Though this was my original idea, the time constraints, and the numerous attempts to try to get LaTeX implemented in the project, I ended up making a simpler application which just takes in a user inputted equation and inserts it into a sheet under the equation sheet header. Some of the challenges of building this project were my own constraints of having only worked in JavaScript for a few weeks, and doing about a week of JavaScript and Rails work in total before this. Initially, understanding how all of the relationships worked, and how information was meant to travel from the rails backend to the javascript frontend were incredibly confusing. However through actually working on the project myself I found that it was actually a lot simpler than I made it out to be in my head. Through simple fetch requests, you are able to take the information stored in the rails backend, and convert it into JSON. That JSON is then able to be manipulated by the javascript written in the front end. I still want to continue to work on this project, and expand it to where it meets the original vision that I had in mind, however for a start I feel like it was a great learning experience.