Field Notes

Since working, I've tried to embrace a company culture of having a life outside of a text editor. My pace of learning has downshifted, but here and there, I've been able to cross a few things off the list.

Create a rails websocket server with Pusher. "Real" time events. Amaze.

Switch debugging tools from pry to byebug. Stepping through code on Ruby 2 / Rails 4 projects has never felt so right.

The blog posts I should have written during the height of my internship:

Transitioning from basic CRUD apps, to insane huge projects.

Tradeoffs of TDD.

Code reviewing developers with 10000x more programming experience.

Writing for BNR, and dealing the worst case of imposterer syndrome I've ever had.

Yesterday at the Atlanta Ruby Meetup Group, John Saddington from the Iron Yard shared his thoughts on blogging. My favorite slide was on excuses. While I relate, in part, to many, I would say mine is mostly perfectionist avoidance.

The attitude, is if I can't live up to my own standards it's not worth doing at all. There are pros and cons to this.

Today, I had an amazing start to my internship at the Big Nerd Ranch! Most of the day was dedicated to setting up my new MacBookPro and learning dev tools. The head of the internship program set aside time to discuss the goals of the program, which was a great kick-off.

Most of the afternoon was with my mentor. I definitely have the impression that she is someone who is genuinely interested in my learning. I'm really happy about her level of interest in being my mentor, and, I really just want to learn an astronomical amount.

https://www.hungrywolftshirts.com is displaying a pretty sweet green lock next to the url!

Before adding SSL, I had previously purchased the domain through GoDaddy, and configured it by following the Heroku walk through. All customer credit card information was actually being entered and passed with SSL through Strips.js, but using https on the site was still recommended.

My first step, was reading through Heroku SSL Endpoint documentation. I ended up following shripadk's tutorial on github, combined with some other resources as well. A few tricky areas worth mentioning:

The csr form Common Name needed to be www.hungrywolftshirts.com, not the root domain.

After running heroku certs:add, the last step was updating the CNAME at GoDaddy. The new Heroku certification endpoint (mynewsecureaddress.herokussl.com) replaced the original heroku url (originally set up when configuring the custom domain).

At a recent ruby meetup, friend of a friend introduced me to Scott Rocher, CTO at Tonx coffee. I asked him for advice on my e-commerce project, and he kindly suggested looking into a couple of gems.

Cartman Given that I had already made item objects to be purchased, Scott recommended Cartman, a Redis backed gem that builds carts (or baskets), and calculates totals, number of items, etc. You can do things like

cart = Cartman::Cart.new(user_id) cart.add_item( id: 1, type: "TshirtA", unit_cost: 10, quantity: 1) cart.add_item( id: 2, type: "TshirtB", unit_cost: 20, quantity: 2) cart.total => 50 cart.quantity => 3 cart.destroy!

Note - all cartman costs are in cents!

Testing As it turns out, DatabaseCleaner requires that an ORM (object relational mapper) is identified when it is run. It just so happens, that ActiveRecord is the default ORM, which is why I've never had to explicitly state it! Naturally, using MongoID had me scratching my head. Here are the changes that got things up and running:

Files where DatabaseCleaner is configured: Rspec - spec/spec_helper.rb Cucumber - features/support/env.rb

Code for MongoID:

DatabaseCleaner[:mongoid].strategy = :truncation

Code for ActiveRecord:

DatabaseCleaner.strategy = :truncation

Deploying Deploying to Heroku using the MongoHQ cloud server was a little tricky. In order to "migrate", or copy local database information to the cloud, specific database users and passwords needed to be set up. PostgreSQL and SQLite3 don't require any sort of authentication to get things up and running, so it was an extra step.

Voice recognition is. so. cool!

If you're on chrome, check out this awesome js library called Annyang!. Ben Klang gave an amazing talk at the Atlanta Ruby Meetup with lots of demos (the best kind).

A few days ago I decided to start building an e-commerce website dedicated to selling vintage Duran Duran t-shirts from the 80's. Yes, the T-shirts are real, and amazing.

Today, I basically restarted the project in order to try out a noSQL database. A few things I learned:

( SQL : ActiveRecord : Rails ) == ( MongoDB : MongoID : Rails ).

( ActiveRecord : Object Relational Mapper ) == ( MongoID : Object Document Mapper )

For Rails 3 and 4 apps, I found that MongoID has more implementation resources than MongoMapper.

Without ActiveRecord, I'm learning a lot more about ActiveRecord.

Week 1: Rails. Prior to this, we had been working in Sinatra. Our weekend assignment was the learn, and teach how ajax works in Rails. My team converted Sinatra Deaf Grandma into a single page Rails app for our study.

Over the course of the week, we converted more projects into rails. We also jumped into unit and feature testing.

I kind of fell in love with TDD / BDD. It requires thinking, planning, and discussion prior to touching the keyboard, which is super cool, and takes a lot of discipline. The tools we used were Rspec, Capybara, FactoryGirl, Database Cleaner, and Selenium WebDriver.

Our Friday assignment was building a web app. I was on an amazing team that pushed out CineHerd, a discussion forum for cinemagraph image sharing over the course of a weekend.

Week 2: On Monday, each team traded code bases with other teams. We did more exercises in refactoring, and practiced OOD JavaScript.

On Thursday, we pitched final project ideas. My idea was selected, which was awesome. Our team came to a couple of agreements that day:

Agile. We had a pin up board of index cards with user stories written on them. Cards were organized by highest priority, and every 2 hours during our stand-ups, we would reevaluate. We would also switch off tasks based on what was needed. We all were able to work on several parts of the project that way.

Testing. TDD / BDD even if it means writing less code.

Team. Acknowledge weaknesses, give space, be understanding.

My team ended up eating almost every meal together for 8 days straight. We honestly got along, really, really well. Almost every day, decisions were made that not all of us agreed on, but we stuck together. At the end of it all, we proudly did a live demo of HuemorMe. It was fantastic.

So, what is HuemorMe? It is a web application that allows users to control their Philips Hue lights from anywhere in the world.

What the f does that mean? Pretend you just bought the Philips Hue starter pack. You install it, and realize that you can only control your amazing wireless lamps through your phone when it is connected to your local wireless network. But ah, you think it would be really cool to turn on your lights when you leave the office, so that when you get home everything is lit.

That's where the HumeorMe application comes in.

How does it work?

When a user creates an account, they are prompted to download a small daemon program that include a unique secret token. Ideally, this would be downloaded and run on something like a Raspberry Pi. When the daemon program starts, it continuously sends a signal to the web application, asking what the state of the light bulbs should be. At any given moment, a user can change the state of the lights on the web application, and that state on the web app will be relayed back to the daemon. The daemon will send that signal to the light bulbs, and there you have it.

What cool features does it have?

I had the most amazing phase 3 one could wish for.

I've probably said "wait, wtf am I doing?" this week, more than any other time in my life. Embracing confusion can be easier said than done.

Thanks to the many hours of help I sought after with TA's Matt, Josh, and my instructor Anne, I'm starting to embrace this JS prototype and OOD business. Of course, there are things I'd like to change (like using .test() instead of .match()).

The challenge was to validate html form inputs, and display the validation errors by modifying JS only:

I think I'm one of the few that is happy to have worked through the Hartl tutorial before DBC, and would still recommend it to others as prep. When I met a C# developer at RailsGirls who said, "I have no idea what's going on, it's just copying and pasting", I knew that the purposes of the exercise, for me, was simply to gain exposure on web development. Hind sight, it's also a way to gain exposure to the level of difficulty, and struggle that is embraced at DBC.

Database week has been killer. We drew a few schemas, coded them into ruby classes, put the classes into a sqlite3 database, and then... ActiveRecord entered our lives, in all it's Base class glory.

My pair and I had a very shallow understanding of ActiveRecord "magic", so our process was to first write a query using Sqlite3 syntax, find the corresponding Active Record syntax, and then refactor our ruby code into something reasonable.

I think my shining moment of today, was mentally separating the ruby parts from the AR parts, and writing a simple method that answered multiple count type questions.

Question 1: How many pink tulips are there? Question 2: How many perennials need full sunlight? def count(args) Flowers.where(args).count end count(:name => "Tulip", :color => "Pink") count(:bloom => "Perennial", :sun => "full")

05:30 - Alarm 05:45 - Redo of exercise P7, apply yesterday's lesson on MVC and process 07:00 - Shower 08:00 - Leave for DBC

08:30 - Arrive at DBC, fill waterbottle, continue working on P7 08:50 - Accountability groups - parsing and socrates 09:00 - Check-ins

10:00 - 1st Group Project - description 10:30 - White-board a story of what the program does 10:45 - White-board nouns and verbs as categories(model, view, controller) in classes, variables, and behaviors 11:15 - Divide team responsibilities 11:20 - Setup github repo with contributors, basics of push/pull 11:35 - Start coding 11:30 - Discuss neccessity of wrapper methods and View's responcibilities 11:35 - Code and discuss

12:30 - Meet friend for lunch

01:45 - Continue discussing class responcibilities and integration 02:00 - Code and discuss 03:00 - Team debug and test

04:00 - OOD Lecture 04:30 - Team refactor and test 05:00 - Teacher feedback and review 05:15 - 4-way high-five

I decided to skip the office and work from home today. It was nice reflecting on the week by typing up hand-written notes.

Over the past few days, I've really enjoyed developing pseudocoding skills. Strategizing frameworks, or coding architecture, is really fascinating and exciting to me. In the spirit of Louis Sullivan "form (ever) follows function", I believe in the process, and the significance of articulating high-level objectives before diving in to code.

Pseudocode was something that I had read about, but didn't really understand how to implement on my own. Learning it at DBC has been fantastic. It's so nice being equipped with examples, ready-resources, and most importantly, lots of opportunity to practice.

I really do appreciate all forms of architecture building design. But alas, I am, and will probably always be a modernist at heart. Corbu and Mies forever!!!

Pairing with Ishwar today, was amazing. One of the many amazing things we did, was review the RDoc on Regex, and whiteboard a list of matchers and returns. From there, we were able to efficiently know and apply the right tools for the job.

The morning session on giving and receiving constructive feedback was also incredible. We focused on what happens internally, and practiced giving/receiving feedback with a pair from yesterday. What really blew me away, was when people volunteered to share personal observations on themselves from the exercise. The whole session was pretty chill, but the honesty and courage that were displayed, almost made my eyes water.