Coding challenges are a part of life for any developer, whether you are a student, interviewer, or interviewee. It’s important to know how to approach these challenges and not be intimidated by them, and you can become a much better problem solver in the process. I, for one, enjoy puzzles and genuinely like coding challenges, whether they have any real-world application or not. So here’s my 5 steps to coding challenges:

While working on the Flash Card App, we needed to solve an issue of passing Ruby data stored as variables onto the page via JavaScript, without reloading the page. This was necessary because our design of the application was to be a single page user experience, using Rail’s unobtrusive JavaScript. A bit of asking around on Slack and Googling led to the Gon Gem.

Sometimes, it’s nice to get a great layout of your database, but you don’t want to take the time to draw it all out by hand, whether on a computer or paper. Luckily, there’s a very quick and easy way to this, and it’s called Rails ERD.