Vegan’s Restaurant Survival Guide, a Sinatra based web application

Photo by Mor Shani on Unsplash

Since before I started my journey as a software engineering student, I’ve always wanted to build a blog where I would be able to help myself and other people find plant-based food at non-vegan restaurants.

This idea became more appealing to me during this pandemic, with many good restaurants closing permanently, especially some that I already knew had vegan-friendly food. Since my husband, family and friends are not vegan, I’ve always faced the challenge to go out with them. Usually, as soon as I know where we are going, I search all over the internet for vegan options at the chosen restaurant. However, a simple dinner becomes stressful when I deal with a last-minute invitation and I don’t have enough time to do my search.

Vegan’s Restaurant Survival Guide is a web application with features of Sinatra and ActiveRecord. It allows different users to create an account, sign in, also create with time created/updated, read, update, and delete a post (CRUD).

I enjoyed developing this application and increasing my knowledge of ActiveRecord. It seems a lot to learn at first, but with time everything starts making sense. After learning the fundamentals of associations, I now understand how complex it is to develop a web application.

I had fun building this project. Ruby has slowly started to make more sense, in general, and it was super helpful to watch how everything integrates in relation to websites. I am still a newbie in this programming territory, but the amount I have already learned just amazes and makes me want more.

I hope that Vegan’s Restaurant Survival Guide will evolve into a useful guide for those adventurers like me out there. Personally, I know I am gonna keep improving it and use it as my guide for eating out at non-vegan restaurants, and at the same time just focus on having a memorable time with people instead of spending time asking the waiter to find out if the soup has beef broth or not.

You can view the source code: https://github.com/eagrundy/vegan-survival-guide