The seventh week of course introduced a new framework: Ruby on Rails. Ruby is a general-purpose programming language, though it is best known for its use in web programming. Rails is a ruby gem that extends the Ruby programming language. Rails combines Ruby with HTML, CSS and JavaScript to create web applications that run on a web server (that is why Rails is considered a server-side or backend framework).

The weekend challenge was building a simplified clone of instagram on Ruby on Rails where users can post pictures, write comments on pictures and like a picture. As a bonus, styling the website like the real instragram’s site (or more awesome).

During the week we learned how Rails applications are organized using a pattern that other developers would recognize. Code is easier to write, understand and maintain if it fits a pattern you are familiar with. In this case, that pattern is again Model-View-Controller.

The goals of this exercise were:

• Understand how Rails applications are organized. How to separate concerns and responsabilities applying correctly the MVC pattern. What are the actions of the controllers ?, how should I present the information to the user (views), what database tables do I need (models) ?…

• Getting familiar with database migrations.

• Use correctly the Gemfile and separate the gems into groups according to the purpose of them (test, development, production).

• Search the appropriate gems that help us solving the challenge. In this case, I used Cloudinary, which is an end-to-end image management solution for websites and mobile apps. My instagram clone uses Cloudinary for image uploads, storage and simple manipulations. Another gem used in this project is acts_as_votable which allows records (pictures) to be votable. Another important gem used for this project is devise, a flexible authentication solution for Rails.

• Experiment with styling frameworks. This app uses Bootstrap, a combination of HTML, CSS and JavaScript code designed to help build user interface components (Front-end-Framework).

• How to prevent sensible data, like API keys and passwords from being published on GitHub using environment variables both locally and on Heroku.

• Use Test-Driven Development as a development cycle (red-green-refactor). Implement feature and unit test in order to test the app and find regressions.

You can see my work on this GitHub repo. The application has been deployed on Heroku. You can share your images with the world here.