This is the spot I’m using to document some of the challenges the Merch team and I have faced over the course of the project. I’ll try and include code snippets as much as possible to show what we’re dealing with but that all depends on time. By the way, my partner in crime on this project is @tahaadiljalil; a new friend from Bitmaker Labs in Toronto. Enjoy!

First Steps: User Sign Up and Log In

Essentially, we built this whole step nearly to completion locally on our machines using a pretty standard Rails setup and gemset which worked really well until we had to integrate what we had with [Parse](www.parse.com). Getting our baby Rails app to share data with a prebuilt database on Parse proved to be a pretty big speed bump. Naturally, we spent some time searching out a solution and eventually thought we’d found one. Enter parse_resource.

The goal of parse_resource is to make...

I told myself to take time and write about Bitmaker Labs earlier than the end of the 7th week. Ideally I wanted to write about it at the end of every week rather than once near the end of the program. But it got busy and I forgot, so it’s happening now instead. C'est la vie.

I want to focus on before I started at Bitmaker. If you’re thinking about joining the program but you’re on the fence, I suggest looking up a few of the other students that have posted regularly about their experience. Some of them are from Bitmaker but almost everything I read before the first day was from guys and girls taking a similar course somewhere else in North America. By and large, they said essentially the same thing; that the bootcamp coding experience works for some people and doesn’t work for others. I made the decision to take a course like this when I started to see the huge gap between learning code...