Animal Crossing Tracker

Background

In the game Animal Crossing: New Horizons, you are taken to make a new home on a deserted island. A major part of the game is collecting all sorts of things to put in a museum on the island. This app helps the user track what they have already collected, as well as see what conditions must be met before they can collect more.

Project Objectives

  • Learn Ruby on Rails (starting at no knowledge)
  • Become comfortable with Git version control
  • Work on a project with my wife

What I Learned

It's important to keep in mind that I started this with no knowledge of Ruby, Rails, or jQuery. As such, this is not a complete list - that would just be rewriting every line of code from the project. But to summarize, here are some important things I got to learn through this project:

  • Active Record associations, including polymorphic relationships
  • Installing and running Rails applications on Heroku
  • PostgreSQL, including datatypes such as hstore and jsonb
  • Ruby methods, classes, modules, and syntax - I find the ufo operator <=> to be especially fun
  • Basic jQuery, including ajax (although ajax wasn't required for the final implementation because I figured out a more Railsy way to handle it)
  • Some HTML and CSS things, since I needed to set attributes on HTML elements for certain behaviors to work
  • User Authentication with Auth0
  • Git branching, merging, rebasing - technically I have done these all before, but I understand them far better now

Project Shortcomings and Obstacles

The primary problem on this project (so far) was a good one; a lot of times while researching on how to build a new component, I would come across a better way of designing a prior component. Maybe this isn't ideal for a product, but this app is a learning project, so I consider it to be positive when this happens. Additionally, that helped me both in practicing version control (especially branching) and refactoring, which is part of the lifecycle of a lot of products. I am now confident that given a Rails codebase, I could implement a change to it without breaking anything, which feels good.

However, the project does have flaws. At the current time, I think that there are too many rows in the database for the amount of data actually recorded. This is because of an inefficient design choice made before I fully understood how to implement polymorphic relationships between objects in Rails. I would say that CollectibleAttributes, as a model, are unnecessary and can be removed from the project entirely. This would reduce rows in the database by close to half, assuming zero users. With a large number of users, the change from fixing this would be small in comparison to all the users' data.

The greatest flaws with this project are in the front end code I wrote. Even though I have never used Rails or Ruby, I know what kinds of things I should be able to do with them because of prior experience with database software (mysql) and object-oriented programming languages (Java, C#). However, there were certain components that I knew should act a certain way on the client side. For these behaviors, I ended up using jQuery, and by far this is the weakest area in the project.

I decided that jQuery would be the way to go because I could fit it in to the project better - my alternative would have been React. I have worked with React connected through APIs to the back end, and this wouldn't have been impossible by any means for this project. However, I wanted to see as much of Rails as I could, so I wanted to use it for the model, controller, and views.

The jQuery I used does what it should, but the placement is the main problem. I didn't figure out how to make it work properly in a separate file; apparently this has changed from Rails 5 to Rails 6 and I didn't understand what needed to be done.

Finally, there are some features that I have prepared for with the back end code, such as having custom collections and sharing collections between users, that I have yet to be able to implement because I need more front end knowledge to make them work the way I feel they should.