When I first gave thought to deploying my final project - making my Rails/React app available for employers and recruiters to look at - I immediately thought of putting it on Heroku. I knew this would involve some refactoring on my backend to make it work with PostgreSQL, but that turned out to be a rather painless process. When it came time to deploy my frontend, though, my mind rebelled. It’s all part of the same app! How do I get it to work when I’m having to create two apps? And why would you set it up that way in the first place? As I thought about it more, I realized that in this case, the “how” explains the “why.”
Literally meaning “Rail-React”, my final project is an English-Esperanto dictionary making use of seed data from Reta Vortaro. In addition to providing one-to-one translations between English and Esperanto words, users will also have the ability to log into the site, provide descriptions/clarifications of words and upvote or downvote those descriptions.
In continuing with the theme of my Rails project, my JavaScript project is a simple chatroom-style app that displays helpdesk tickets with their associated comments, associating them to a specific user.
For my Rails portfolio project, I decided to tackle a project I had wanted to do at my previous job: making a working helpdesk application. The municipal government where I worked prior to starting my Flatiron course used the same web service for tracking both public works work orders and IT tickets, which made our lives difficult as there was no way to assign priority, filter out closed work orders or even create users without a lot of rigmarole with our service provider. So in memory of those frustrations, I decided to see if I could do better.