Carolina Code School

I had zero experience in software development before I took a 12 week and immersive full stack web development course through Carolina Code School in Greenville, SC. After 9 weeks of intense course work, I created a final project in 2.5 weeks to demo to the community.

I created Life Pawtners, which utilizes IBM Watson’s Visual Recognition program along with the Petfinder API and Google Maps API to help people find animals available for adoption based on pictures they upload to the app. You can see more details here, or the live app here.

Before I was able to create Life Pawtners though, I learned the basics of HTML/CSS. JavaScript, and Ruby on Rails. I’ve come a long way since taking this course, but I’m still proud of what I was able to learn and accomplish in such a short amount of time.

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HTML and CSS

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We were given mockups that we had to implement in static HTML files as close to pixel perfect as we could. Here are a few from my New York 1 and New York 2 layouts we were given.

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JavaScript

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I created a variety of JavaScript projects from simple text analyzing projects to creating calculators and shopping carts.

You can view my Calculator and Palindrome detector below or on CodePen

Calculator

See the Pen Calculator by Emma Converse Hunter (@emmaconverse) on CodePen.

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Palindrome Detector

(Hint: a palindrome is a word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward,

“Tacocat” is a palindrome)

See the Pen Palindrome Detector by Emma Converse Hunter (@emmaconverse) on CodePen.

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Ruby on Rails

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When we started on Ruby we began with fairly simple apps with few models and associations.

Our first project was a Bookstore that taught us how simple models and controllers work within Rails.

We also incorporated Devise into this app to allow users to have basic login functions.

This is an example of the basic model associations:

class User < ApplicationRecord
  devise :database_authenticatable, :registerable,
         :recoverable, :rememberable, :validatable

  has_many :books, foreign_key: :author_id

  has_many :sales
  has_many :purchased_books, through: :sales,
    class_name: "Book", foreign_key: :book_id
end

# ------------------------------------------

class Sale < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :user
  belongs_to :book
end

# ------------------------------------------

class Book < ApplicationRecord
  belongs_to :author, class_name: "User"

  has_many :sales
  has_many :users, through: :sales
end