The whole concept of abstraction is truly fascinating. It’s something that’s so deeply intertwined into all nuances of functioning in life, really.
From a professional/corporate standpoint, it’s based on my experience that the higher your title ranks and/or level of roles and responsibilities are undertaken, the more far-removed you become from the “weeds” and technical details that explain how a company’s specific brand of “magic” actually happens. The general assumption is that one climbs this corporate ladder (another mental abstraction that’s intended to evoke ideas of career progression), starting from the bottom where one presumably expands their knowledge base and acquires skillsets through hands-on execution, driven by a more intimate understanding of the ins-and-outs of operational business. The higher up you go, the farther you zoom out of the nitty gritty details; and evolving with you are your priorities from a focus on delivering/execution to a strategic state of mind.
Jumping from one of my thought bubbles to another based on a loose connection, I find my experience with Sinatra in producing the final project follows such a similar theme. The farther removed you become from the details of how a picture gets painted, you’re able to step back to see the bigger picture and/or canvas to focus on what to paint in the first place. It’s executing vision vs. envisioning.
After the first half of the program was dedicated toward deeply understanding the nuances of theory based on active execution, Sinatra and ActiveRecord seem to be our segue into elevating our frame of thought. Now, we’ve got these buckets of conceptual tools that abstract away the details for us, so that, essentially, we can focus on strategizing what kinds of “pictures” we could be painting moving forward.
For this specific Sinatra project, I brainstormed on what kind of apps I’d personally find valuable. It just so happened that I’d been browsing online for skincare products (especially now that I’ve experienced that maskne is indeed a real thing). What I’d find useful is a learning/shopping tool that brings together not only the research part of shopping for skincare, but also the buying. A tool that scans what’s out there about any product — details, reviews, price points, competitors, and places to purchase — and delivers that to consumers in one, centralized portal.
On a most basic level, to water that aspiration all the way down to one of the tool’s likely functions birthed my project’s purpose: a portal that enables users to create and save their own lists of cosmetic products, and browse other users’ lists as well.