After building with several Ruby and JavaScript frameworks, I wanted to compare and contrast login forms across different platforms. Signup and login forms are a crucial component of any user account based application as they require authenticated credentials for access beyond the landing page. They also have a variety of options to notify the user of the overall process such as success and error messages based on the validations. Going back to some of the initial commits of my earlier projects, specifically in Ruby on Rails, I noticed that the signup and login forms were not structured with classes or ids, which made for some interesting code.
Having recently updated components of my portfolio site, I’ve also started to brainstorm what types of projects that I can build to improving my development skills as well as expand my portfolio. Throughout the past few months, I’ve created some mini projects including a countdown timer using and a mini forum application using the Sinatra library, but they were never on the magnitude of Renecades Gameroom or Reel 2 Real.
One of the main projects that I focused on in January was revitalizing components of my portfolio site that were not responsive during initial deployment back in October. I’ve detailed some of the elements in previous blog posts such as the restructuring of the project containers, the navigation bar, and updating the development skills. While building my portfolio site with React was a great test of my programming abilities, it’s also been a time-consuming process to implement certain features such as connecting the contact form and my email.
In my previous blog posts, I’ve discussed a handful of the portfolio site features that I wanted to implement in order to make it responsive and readable across various devices. Having used Bootstrap with other applications, I started researching some of best ways to transform components so that they are responsive on a different screen size. However, I encountered an issue that kept overriding all of the manual CSS that I had built so instead I used an incredible resource called npmjs.com, which offers a variety of open source packages to install into your applications.
Throughout my job search, I’ve had conversations with several Flatiron Alumni as well as employees of companies that are hiring software engineers. One of the questions that I always ask them is “What advice would you give about how to stand out from other candidates?” I wanted to share some of the best tips that I’ve learned from these meetings and discuss how I can apply them to improve my communication and development skills.