Adventures in Code

Wouldn’t it be great if you could see National Parks that are close to places you’re already visiting? My React and Rails student project, Visit More Parks, scans your upcoming Google Calendar events, geocodes locations for those events, and suggests parks within100 miles of each destination. Taking advantage of the suggestions, the app also makes it easy to add a park visit to your calendar.

What It Does

• The user logs in with their Google Calendar account.
• US National Parks are pre-loaded with geocoded coordinates and addresses (using the NPS.gov Parks API and the Geocoder Ruby gem).
• Upcoming calendar events are geocoded and displayed with their nearby parks.
• The user can add visits to any of the parks as calendar events.
• Those new events include park information, such as description, address, and URL.
• All 497 National Parks are browsable.

Posted by Aaron Parkening on February 29, 2020

Professional kitchens need to know their recipe costs to profitably price their food. My JavaScript and Rails student project, Recipe Costs, makes it easy to determine both the full cost and cost per serving of each recipe.

App Features

• Recipe cost is automatically calculated once ingredients are added. If servings are entered, cost per serving is also calculated.
• Ingredient conversions are automatic. Recipe amounts entered as cups will seamlessly take advantage of costs entered as liters or gallons, for example.
• App-wide ingredients provide fast recipe creation. Users can create, modify, and delete ingredients.
• Recipes can be easily created, modified, and deleted.
• Search bar makes it simple to find recipes by name.

Posted by Aaron Parkening on December 18, 2019

Professional kitchens need to know their recipe costs to profitably price their food. My Rails student project, Recipe Costs, makes it easy for chefs to figure out the cost-per-serving of their recipes.

App Features

• Users can log in directly or through their Google account.
• Authenticated users can create, read, update, and delete their own recipes and ingredients.
• Recipe costs are calculated per recipe and per serving.
• Ingredient conversions are automatic. Recipe amounts entered as cups will seamlessly take advantage of costs entered as liters or gallons, for example.
• App-wide ingredients and default costs provide faster recipe creation, and users can customize ingredient prices for their own recipes.
• Users can browse their full recipe list or recipes by ingredient.

Posted by Aaron Parkening on October 19, 2019

My Sinatra student project app is Tea Tastes, “The Place to Think Tea”. I wanted to create a place to write down and share thoughts about teas in a structured way, revolving around models of users, notes, and shops. Along the way, I expanded the app to include a tea model, and then things really got crazy!

Posted by Aaron Parkening on August 14, 2019

While delving deeper into Ruby object-oriented programming, I’ve wanted my methods and classes to do more work with less explicit code. Creating three classes that have 80% code overlap is difficult to maintain and feels clunky, so I’ve moved a lot of my code into sharable modules and inheritable classes. And to really make this sharable and inheritable code most flexible, I’ve turned to metaprogramming.

Posted by Aaron Parkening on July 19, 2019