Learnin'

During a phone screen recently, the CTO of the company was going through my portfolio site. He checked the browser’s network console and noticed that the site — a page built with React components — was sending multiple requests a second for data from a JSON object [the object serves as the page’s datastore because spinning up a database in this instance would be overkill]. A learning moment! I revisited the React docs and the code for the components. With a better understanding of React, the issue was quickly apparent: every time the Dealer component was rendered, an AJAX request for data.json fired. Which, just to get static data, was a lot. ...

Resolving the $ conflict between jQuery and YUI… …and what YUI is. All sorts of Apache configuration business, which turned out to be a lot of setting file permissions. chmod g=rw myfile gives read and write permissions to all of the current group members for myfile 87% of the CSS being loaded on my current project aren’t being used Use Chrome Dev Tools to audit yourself Intro to vi commands! i to start typing, esc to stop [i for “insert mode”] Once done typing, :wq to save and quit Jump to line 34 when not in insert mode: :34

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. ...

Day One at MakerSquare. Half day, on account of the Veteran’s Day parade, which I sadly missed. Heard that the oldest surviving WWII vet was there. Richard Overton. 107 years old. From Bastrop County, Texas, born in 1906. From the Great War to the Depression to the Pacific Theater to television to the civil rights movement to a man on the moon to Watergate to the oil crisis to the moral majority to the dot com era to 9/11 to a persistent world wide web to the recession to the present day. ...

I love inject. To be more specific, I love Enumerable#inject. I find it easy to read and easy to use. It’s powerful and it lets me be more concise. Enumerable#inject is a good thing. Jay Fields’ Thoughts Facts. I’ve seen this thing in action before, but really started to scrape the surface today. It seems to be a good example of Ruby is about, namely making coding more friendly for people & allowing multiple ways of doing things. 

Finally learned enough jQuery to update my website from “copied-and-pasted jQuery that sorta works sometimes” to “works gooder all the time.” Small steps.