[I]nstead of constantly griping about having to type Hirb.enable, I found how to automagically load it in the Rails console: 1. In your home directory [ ~ ], type subl .irbrc 2. Paste in this bit: if defined?(Rails) && Rails.env require ‘hirb’ Hirb.enable end 3. Save and enjoy*. *Confirmed working with OS X 10.6.8 and [Rails] 4.0.2 Yes, my OS is old and janky - stop laughing. via Poop’s comment at http://tagaholic.me/2009/09/07/hirb-tips-for-rails.html
Day 18 of MakerSquare. All sorts of things going on today, with a half-hour delay due to the weather. Practiced using Git in new ways to collaborate in preparation for the hackathon. In the afternoon, we used YouTube’s API to populate fields in our MyTube web application just based on the video’s ID. And if that wasn’t enough, we watched this video on the projector. Instead of starting to wind down at 4 pm today, we instead started our first hackathon. My group, Team CEE Low [it’s an acronym thing], is working on Text-spiration, a service from which people receive inspirational text messages daily. Users will be able to select from a category of messages and a time of day to receive said message.Everything on the backend seemed cut-and-dry, but after we got to work following dinner, things didn’t look so clear. It probably won’t be easy, but I’m looking forward to doing what I signed up for: building stuff. ...
Day 17 at MakerSquare. I had some sort of idea for a title on the bike ride to MKS this morning, but it was lost. Pretty sure it was brilliant and insightful. Rails week continues: Using Active Records to associate tables in the morning: tables talking to each other! Test-driven Rails development in the afternoon: red to green with Rails! Surprise visit from the folks at Ordoro: they brought us burritos and now rank among the greatest people in the world. Started to plan the co-authoring of documentation for a Ruby gem we used in class last week. But, that will have to come later: our first hackathon starts Friday afternoon. It’ll probably be wise to go over my Ruby and Javascript notes tomorrow, and healthy to go over the yoga moves I practiced today, ahead of the madness good times of the coming weekend.
Day 16 of MakerSquare. More Rails today - are you detecting a theme? Got into the nitty-gritty of CRUD - Create Read Update Delete - systems. We mimicked nearly the entire development history of Web 2.0 over the course of a day. The program has been evolving, as well. We started taking daily progress exams at the end of the lessons. The gut reaction to ‘exam’ is always one of apprehension and resistance, but aren’t we here to be tested? It ties back into the OODA loop, and the near-constant reaction to changing conditions. It certainly wasn’t hyperbole when we were cautioned, on Day 1, that things move quickly around here. ...
Day 15 of MakerSquare. More Rails today, with an introduction to ActiveRecord. Got into the dirt of databases - making them, reading from them, writing to them, modifying them, and deleting them. So much better than messing around with placeholder hashes to store and read data. Ah, the joys of encapsulation. We continued to see our Ruby terminology carry over. As I was discussing with a classmate here at Cafe Bedouins, learning Rails before Ruby seems incomprehensible at this point. One question lingers from the day, though: Why hasn’t Hirb.enable been rolled into the Rails console as a permanent, always-on setting? ...
http://xkcd.com/1296/ Add this to the list of jokes I now get.
XML is like violence - if it doesn’t solve your problems, you are not using enough of it. http://nokogiri.org/
Day 14 of MakerSquare. All Rails, all day. Routes, parameters, controllers. The diagram was just a stack of blocks at first, but once we started getting into building things, the language of Rails became natural. Well, maybe not natural, but familiar. Ish. We built a YouTube-style video-viewing site, cleverly called MeTube. Initial impressions: lots of capacity to do lots of things, but wow, gotta keep those naming conventions organized. [Note to self: invest in Post-It notes] We worked with hard-coding information into the site, then moved to passing in parameters through the URL - both query strings and dynamic segments. ...
itscolossal: Circuit Scribe: Instantly Draw Functional Electrical Circuits on a Piece of Paper
Introduction to Sinatra after building a reservation system with JavaScript. It was a half day and when I had an opportunity to get a ride home, a strange thing happened: I didn’t jump at the opportunity. I had enjoyed experimenting and learning Sinatra, and wanted to keep going. Momentum is key in situations like this (cue a speech about inertia being synonymous with death, set to take place in two weeks). ...