Prior to my Sinatra project, I had watched a YouTube video from Clément Mihailescu, he shared 3 lessons he learned in 4 years of coding. I was able to apply those to my Sinatra project as well.
1. Don’t get too attached to your code
When you spend hours on building the Sinatra project, it’s natural that you will build an attachment towards your code, it is normal. Be open to edit or delete them. Treat your code as an experience you can part with when the time comes. I did a peer review on this project too, like what I did during my CLI project, I find peer reviewing extremely helpful and encouraging.
2. Coding is a means to an end (product/service)
I couldn’t agree more with what Clément said “In almost any circumstance, coding and software is not the end goal, the end goal is building a product or service that is going to change people’s lives for the better.” Though we are not necessary working on “real life” projects, I think it is a good practice to keep this in my mind. A few questions I have to ask myself while working on Sinatra project, “Is this site easy to be navigated by users?” Do not obsessed with engineering excellent and forget about the end goal, the main purpose behind the product. I find keeping in mind who my users are, what the purpose of my product is and why this is important to my users the main driving force of creating my app.
3. Write maintainable software
Though not all of us will come back and make changes, add features, or deploy this app in the future, again I would encourage people to get in the mindset of writing maintainable code. Writing maintainable code can look like many things, to me it is giving thought to your code, writing clean code, commenting your code (so you know what you are writing about), and using conventional practices. Building this habit helps creating better product and teamwork, when others are going to look at your code and make changes in the future.
Here is the video that inspired this post