Getting up to speed during my first week on the new job. My first task has been upgrading the versions of Ruby and Rails for the main website. To handle some of the common tasks across web applications, we use an in-house gem. While testing the upgrades, I noticed that some of the JavaScript libraries called in the web app weren’t being pulled out of the gem. It took some digging to discover why, but here’s what I found. ...
Day 22 of MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. Project/catch up day. In addition to working more with riot.js, I built a video playlist manager in Javascript. It’s similar in style and functionality to what we had earlier built with Rails. I’m curious about the advantages and disadvantages of using JS versus Rails for web applications. I imagine that considerations of scale and functionality may be factors. Didn’t get into much Rails work today but, wow, I watched a lot of the new videos from Ruby Conf 2013. Key takeaways from those: leave cryptography to the experts; I’ll better understand garbage collection in the future; there’s a wrapper for git for users of Github [conveniently called hub]; running Ruby on robots looks both easy and fun; and programs like MKS rule. ...
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. ...