Affirm App Offline
Heroku has discontinued their free hosting, so the app is offline until I find a new home for it. Code is still available on GitHub.
Beyond its usefulness, the Affirm app is proof of my familiarity with the basic Rails stack. It involves chiefly
And, to some extent:
Keeping It Simple
This app is intentionally simple and streamlined — well, as simple as a responsive app using a database and external API can be — and did not leverage unit testing frameworks.
SASS was used to support the responsiveness, but only a reset and some ideas for select boxes were leveraged from freely available SASS code out there.
Sometimes understanding the basic level of CSS and SASS and responsiveness can be more important than leveraging front-end frameworks like React or Vue or even Bootstrap and node.js — as in this case.
This app is in the alpha stage and probably will stay that way for some time, as I extend my C#/ASP.NET stack skills.
Notes About the Tech
Rails 6 has a great deal of powerful new features, but its documentation is limited. Googling helps, but sorting through what’s for previous versions of Rails versus Rails 6 takes a little patience. Figuring out what works takes some experimentation, like the different ways to present a select box in the erb, and where certain styles go per select box or individual options.
SASS is completely cool. After using CSS in the early days, and tweaking the CSS of WordPress themes, plugins, and controls — awkward to say the least — seeing the power of modularizing SASS and using variables and mixins is a relief and a pleasure.
Select boxes are evil. The different OS-dependent implementations on small devices versus large devices are tricky to deal with. Yes, there are solutions out there that implement pseudo-select-boxes, but it’s hard to do correctly, especially for accessibility.
Deploying to Heroku using GitHub and Rails was a blast! So easy. Looking forward to learning more about integrated deployment in the future.