Blogs

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). ...

That thing when your design is foiled by a pop-up window.

Day 12 at MakerSquare. Inspired by yesterday’s talk, I got up at 7am to bang on my keyboard and attempt to understand the Twitter gem. I didn’t get far, but I had inadvertently prepared for the day. Front-end: $(this) & jQuery. The concepts were almost confusing, but not quite. I may have had an advantage today because my partner is an old-hand in the Java world. Interesting bit: ‘undefined’ is not less than 2. ...

Day 11 at MakerSquare. Started the day with a motivational/direction-giving/advise-giving talk from a graduate of cohort #2, who two weeks out from graduating, has accepted an offer at a local company, which is sort of a big deal. The main bit of advice for us was that we should code, code, and code. And then code some more. Front-end: Javascript objects look like hashes but they’re not; they’re objects. We saw something like this structure later in the day, which was a great way to reinforce it. ...

This one is hard to find out there so here it is. If you have an uncommitted change (its only in your working copy) that you wish to revert (in SVN terms) to the copy in your latest commit, do the following: git checkout filename This will checkout the file from HEAD, overwriting your change. This command is also used to checkout branches, and you could happen to have a file with the same name as a branch. All is not lost, you will simply need to type: ...

I had a dream the other night that I initialized a man with magnets in his hands. Day 10 of MakerSquare. Project Day is Friday is Tie Day. Back-end: Working with tests and Rspec to build out a program to score a game of tennis, as described on the Coding Dojo. Jammed up my Sublime Text’s RubyTest package so I have to hop over to the terminal to run my tests like I was sort sort of prole. So, fixing that is going on my list for the weekend, right after I code up some deuce and advantage action. ...

Day 9 of MakerSquare. Back-end: more work with Rspec. Asked more questions today and got a better handle on the process. Diagramming the example code helped, as usual. A side benefit to this program is the opportunity to deeply examine how I best learn. Ammunition for the future. Front-end: more functions in JavaScript with an assist from jQuery. Also better than yesterday. I have developed some sort of value judgment against JS, which means I need to spend more time with it. Preferably while drinking less java. ...

Day 8 at MakerSquare. Came across this image and it’s fairly representative of my learning experiences of the day, specifically the “No” and the choppiness. Back-end: Introduction to rspec and test-/build-driven design. Follow along with the code during the lecture, take notes, work through the lesson. All good. Sit down to write my own tests and, well, see above image. Front-end: More Javascript, specifically jQuery functions. Same story as the morning: follow along, take notes, work through the lesson, but sit down to do my own and …no. ...