So, I’d recently picked up web development, and had picked Ruby on Rails as my language of choice. I’d been working on an app and was supposed to add a new star — ratings feature to it. Sounds simple, right? Nah, I learnt the hard way that it wasn’t.
I’d spent most of my development time trying out and using rubygems with reckless abandon. I mean, why solve a problem from scratch, when there’s a gem already built around it. So, when the time came to add the ratings feature, I went the usual way of looking for a suitable ratings gem to solve that problem. I found a bunch of them actually. But they were outdated, and not currently being maintained. To cap it off, the documentation for most were, uhm, not exactly friendly. That said, I spent a week or so, looking for a suitable gem, and came up short. I got tired, and considered dropping the feature on hold, or putting the project on hold entirely. It was exasperating, knowing that I hadn’t been able to solve the problem, after putting a lot of effort into it.
After a while, I gave up on looking for a gem to work with, and decided to build the ratings feature from scratch. I jumped from site to site, looking for a tutorial that would explain the concepts easily. Lost hope after a while. I was like, don’t these guys know that newbies read their work.
How I got through it
Eventually decided to check out some videos on YouTube and stumbled across one. The guy who uploaded understood me. Ended up following the tutorial, and built a complete star — ratings feature for the app.
What did it teach me?
To avoid being over — dependent on gems. Gems are cool and all, and help you avoid re — inventing the wheel, but it helps to actually make an effort to build from scratch once in a while, even if there’s a gem that does what you are trying to accomplish. It helps you get more experience with problem solving.
