Flatiron Project II
It’s the contrast that hits hardest. The stark variance as to how one actually perceives the two projects. It has made writing — although ‘building’ is perhaps the more accurate term, working system in Ruby and Sinatra to be fantastically different experience versus the command line interface project from only a month ago. Sorry, dear reader this absurd stream of consciousness gushed forth making many assumptions. So lets rewind a bit, and start from the first moment, the initial spark of inspiration for this perhaps rudimentary grasp at creating actually useful software.
It was lunch, certainly. Although incorrect, a vague pork shaped specter lingers in the memory. But it was one seating with my parents, discussing the allocation of vaccines from the state. My father as a pharmacist was detailing the complexities and qualms associated with the insufficient allotment provided by the state government against the very passionate demand for vaccines. A word to the future, this recollection occurs at the beginning of 2021, the COVID-19 (again named for it being the particular detected variation of coronavirus, not the year) pandemic in swing world wide for nearly a year. Essentially, the state provided a relatively wide prescription for how the vaccine should be allocated to people, given the relatively limited supply against the orders of magnitude of population that needed it. Notions of a web application that could alleviate and automate the logistics was enough to kick things into gear. Rare enough for a problem to fall into your lap.
Enough jibber-jabber
-Mr. T
The Vaccine Inventory Management System (VIMS) is a rudimentary application built in Ruby and Sinatra. Using the Corneal Gem as to build an initial scaffolding for two model classes. An extension of ActiveRecord User class as well as a Vaccine class to encapsulate the necessary features of each.
Nominally a User, as an individual person in charge of managing the variety of medications at a single point of use, such as a pharmacy, or hospital. Each User is instantiated with a ‘username’ validated for uniqueness. Each user has their password hashed and salted using the bcrypt gem. Once registered, and logged-in, a user is able to view the a dynamically rendered index of vaccines, as well as view or edit the individual entry for a vaccine. Each of the dummy vaccine instances has been populated with a set of as extended variables: a unique inventory lot number as assigned by the manufacturer, the company of manufacture itself, what type of vaccine it is, and an expiration date, with a base quantity, creation date, and last updated date variables from ActiveRecord itself.