Rails

Background Here at OwnLocal, we’ve built lots of Rails apps and added lots of Ruby code to those apps. As our products and tools have grown organically over the years, our systems have become more opaque and, in some cases, more brittle. In the last quarter of 2016, my team was tasked with automating away a large portion of our bread and butter: writing parsers to extract, transform, and load data from text files sent to us by our partners on a daily basis. Studying the requirements, it seemed to me that the proposed data flow—passing in a text file along with a partner-specific configuration for how the system should translate that data—resembled a pure function: we’d always get the same output from the same input, no side-effects. When I pitched the idea that we build a greenfield project, rather than bolting more functionality onto a Rails app we plan to sunset next year, Drew told us to go for it. ...

Book a Flight to Mars! (Not Really) project | source code developer, designer A speculative fiction flight reservation app set in the near future, facilitating relocation to a newly colonized Mars. Built over 2+ weeks as part of a team of three. Tech Stack Angular.js frontend Ruby on Rails backend ForecastIO & MAAS Mars Weather APIs Foundation & Simple_Form Ruby gems Haml & Sass templating PostgreSQL database Deployed to Heroku

Day 34 of MakerSquare. Morning was perhaps our last lesson on vanilla JavaScript. We learned about prototypes and the .call method. Unique about our preparation was that Gilbert had recorded a version of the lesson as a video for us to watch the night before. I felt that viewing the video and then sleeping really primed my brain for maximum absorption. Moral of the story? Take more naps. Spent more time this afternoon on getting Mars Attracts to a solid place with the Rails portion. We’re growing our databases and are not without pains. But we hammer down the errors as they pop up and keep on developin’.

TL;DR If you are new to the asset pipeline in rails, using custom fonts can be a bit confusing. This is how I recommend getting started: add fonts… [goto](http://aokolish.me/blog/2011/12/24/at-font-face-with-the-asset-pipeline/)

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. ...

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. ...