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Day 7 at MakerSquare. Back-end: Algorithms demystified. Got into the nitty and/or gritty of the Great Hash Versus Array Quandry. There’s the balance to strike between what’s best for the computer [which really is about the user] and what’s easiest to write. Ruby was created with the user [read: programmer] in mind; I wonder where the other trade-offs will be. Spent too long drawing diagrams and writing pseudo-code to solve an aspect of an extra credit problem that wasn’t actually requested. Ha. Takeaway: Beware the trap of walking around with my Ruby-hammer, looking for the question-nails. ...

Get out your popcorn and a notebook [the paper kind]. A thought-provoking watch with some actionable bits if you want to make some Sublime Text extensions. Seriously, I need to stay away from this subversive nonsense. At least for the next nine weeks. After that, I’m taking on all assumptions and eliminating them. 

I saw the best minds of my generation… writing spam filters. Neal Stephenson, Solve For X

Day 6 at MakerSquare. Week 2. This time, I’m in a new building, which is really the old building. The atmosphere is different, but that might just be the absence of glass walls and paint fumes. Upsides: standing desk and a coffee maker.Downsides: one bathroom for 20+ dudes and too much coffee. Back-end now happens in the morning, which is the opposite of last week. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse [but it’s probably neither - “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them”]. Dug deep into Ruby classes with my new pair. Seeing as I’m writing this after catching up on the morning’s work [at 2245], maybe we dug too deep. If we hadn’t though, I wouldn’t have learned that the ‘puts’ method looks for a custom 'to_s’ method in classes, and print that output as opposed to the unreadable-by-human object! My notes from that moment read as, “implicit class methods to make objects readable?! mind blown!” ...

Start of my redesign for Austin Books & Comics. A matter of getting the content in, taking care of some non-critical bugs, and building out the rest of the pages. Not pictured: nifty expanding ‘store’ hours bar revealing the actual store hours

An oldie but a goodie, particularly applicable over the next nine weeks. Probably will need to bust this out every Friday. 

The i element represents a span of text in an alternate voice or mood, or otherwise offset from the normal prose in a manner indicating a different quality of text, such as a taxonomic designation, a technical term, an idiomatic phrase from another language, a thought, or a ship name in Western texts. http://html5doctor.com/i-b-em-strong-element/ This is news to me.

Day 5 at MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. & also project day. Front-end: Pick a website and redesign it. I had originally picked the site for my favorite diner in town, Kerbey Lane. Excellent pancakes, cluttered website. It was correctly suggested that the scope of that redesign would be too much. I then picked another local institution, Austin Books & Comics. I started by sketching out some mockups and jumped in. No good. No good at all. ...

Day 4 at MakerSquare. Started with explanations of why and how things happen here, which is always awesome. I like to understand thought processes and how decisions are made, especially related to design [speaking in the broadest sense of the word]. We were reminded of the Three Pillars to be instilled in us: teamwork, independence, and a love of problem solving. All noble qualities. This reminds me - I need to see if there’s a Twitter account that automatically sends out quotes from Stoic philosphers. If not, well, I’ll add it to the to-do list. ...

The gist pointed out that Hash.new, with its default values, is good for implementing Fibonacci sequences. So I decided to check: fib = Hash.new do |hash,key| k = key.to_i hash[key] = case k when 0 then 0 when 1 then 1 else hash[k-1] + hash[k-2] end end This recursive (and memoized!) definition means that you can do fib[18] and get back 2584, plus you get the Fibonacci numbers from F0 (fib[0]) to F17 (fib[17]). Recursively defined Hashes are useful auto-memoized structures. ...