This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot Challenge : New Beginnings

I built a label maker in ruby/rails to help automate the laborious task of writing names and addresses from a list to envelopes, if you want to do it the old fashion way and not electronically. Like holidays, thank you's, etc...

Demo -

List Home Page

Holiday Contact View

Labels to Print

My repo -

https://github.com/PamBWillenz/Label-Generator

Copilot Experience -

• I used a prompt to get an outline of my project - "I would like to build an app using Ruby, Rails that creates a list of contacts that have names and addresses so I can print labels. Can you give me steps?"
• I then asked copilot to recommend gems to use to print labels.
• I used chat with the file I wanted to edit, then I would incorporate the edits.
• I had an issue with my assets conflicting because I wanted to use bootstrap with simple_form. With Copilot's help I managed to figure out the conflicts and import bootstrap thru node modules vs directly from the gem.
• I used 3 different models.
• I used autocomplete and also used copilot to generate my tests and my seed file. I have used edits, which I love but did not use that today.

GitHub Models

• I started with Claude 3.5 Sonnet, then went to o1 Preview and used GPT 4o the most. When I continually got the same response or the model said I was out of prompts (o1 preview), I switched models. I especially did this when I was troubleshooting.

Conclusion

I feel like New Beginnings mean new ways to approach challenges. My husband and I had a list of more than 200 family and friends that we wanted to send holiday cards, and we had no way to get them in a format to print labels. I wrote all the labels by hand, both for the to: and from:. We can order labels for the from: but you can't do that for the to: so I wanted to automate the process.

I hope this can help others who want to automate their label list printing and use code to automate the process.