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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? ...

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. ...

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). ...

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. ...

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 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. ...