Major Activities of the Day: Alright, I'll be honest. We got some labs to do today, but I ignored them, because... tonight I presented at the meetup! My project is called Eateract.
At the center of the application is a super-fancy JavaScript/Ajax-based form that grabs user options from the server. The user puts together a meal - invites friends, chooses a topic of conversation and some links to send out, searches for recipes (using the Yummly API) and assembles a menu, adds a custom message, picks a date and time, and submits. The application then sends emails to the requested users, letting them know they've been invited to a meal, and giving them a link to the meal page. On the first page load, they can accept or reject the invite, after which subsequent loads will just lead them to the page. They can volunteer to make particular recipes, and the application shows each user who's signed up for what. Of course, there are active links to all the recipes, as well as the links the host has selected for everyone to view in advance.
By the way, here are the pieces I added today:
- Full display for an individual meal
- ActionMailer to send emails to guests
- HTML email (designed for Gmail - sadly, it broke horribly when I tried it in Yahoo! mail)
- Authentication tokens for guests so only guests, not random people, can see the meal (the tokens are included in the links being sent out in the emails)
- Add custom message to email
- RSVP system
So yeah, you can do a lot with Rails in one day, even as a newbie. You can check out the code at https://github.com/amcaplan/eateract; I'll post an update to this post once I put up the app on Heroku.
One slight problem happened during the presentation. I have Facebook login for hosts, and during my presentation, I tried to do a live demo with a new user volunteer from the crowd. Unfortunately, the login failed for her, even though it always worked for me. Should have done a user test first with someone besides myself... anyway, I just logged myself in, and then let her act as me. After that, pretty much everything was fine.
Truth is, what stuck with me wasn't a feeling of how good my product was. I'm very proud of what I was able to put together, but to me, what was more important was just forcing myself to get in front of a crowd, present enthusiastically, and not get fazed by bugs (because I was sure that bugs would crop up, and hey, one did!). I tried to imagine myself giving a TED talk, and used that sort of method - walk around the stage, interact with the crowd, tell people to call stuff out - I think the audience responded well, even if I went a bit overtime.
Bottom line - why did I do this project? Because I see how we as a society are becoming more addicted to social media, and losing our ability to connect face-to-face. I see phones getting pulled out at meals, if not entire laptops, and I worry that our connections with others are becoming superficial. So I decided to put together a project that would flip the agenda - use technology to generate, rather than break up, meaningful social experiences. I also imagine that this would provide a toolset for parents to talk about values with their children. It's not a matter of parents transmitting values as much as showing their children that values are important and worth thinking about.
P.S. Here's a couple of screenshots:
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| Homepage before login |
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| The beginning of the form... |
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| Choosing a topic |
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| It's responsive! (This is the small-screen view) |
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| Choosing recipes |
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