Computer Science À La Carte

Yesterday and today were pretty solid. The subject of the last 48 hours would definitely be Twitter Bootstrap. I'm insanely impressed with the capabilities of matching Rails scaffolding with Twitter Bootstrap.

I've begun to realize the power of the Ruby on Rails Guides also. They are extremely well written and a great resource to hit when you only have time/ opportunity to read. My shotgun approach to learning Rails so far includes a mish mash of Code School, my rails book, rails casts, ruby on rails guide, and other random sites. 

The link at the top, "Always Index your Foreign Keys", is a tremendously well done article explaining how the add_index method for models can make a huge performance index. I learned what he foreign key is in the first place, and how indexing it can reduce search times quite a bit.

Code night was great even though I came in half way. But first, answers to my questions:

"What's up with apparent overlap with shell commands for migrations, and the actual migration classes" Well, as I expected they weren't redundant, but the shell command is creating that class file. I should've remembered that the 'g' in rails g migration is generating a template. You then populate the class file with what you want to happen when you run that migration.

"What's the purpose of 'up' and 'down' methods in your migration class?" That allows you to explicitly tell Rails what to do with your migration when you load it up, rake db:migrate, and what happens when you roll it back, rails db:rollback. A newer convention is to just have def change and rails will be smart enough to know how to rollback your methods. 

Back to tonight. jonw was kind of enough to run through the MVC with me. It all started with an innocent enough question about what the purpose of scope is on your models. Scope allows you to have some database logic that is separated from the controllers. Some might argue that your models shouldn't have a lot of business logic, but it makes sense that you can have filters on your models that ALL your controllers can work with. 

I also learned a lot about what "faster" really means for a site between maybe doing a full rails site, and maybe a rails API with ember. Canvas looks kind of heavy but I don't think that was very avoidable. It sounds like we're already doing a lot of javascript on the page and so ember is a way to move to a newer framework. 

While I'm doing Rails for Zombies 2 I had a couple of questions come to mind that I'll post here, then maybe answer myself later.

There appears to be some feature overlap between doing command line migrations for Rails like the following:

              rails g migration RemoveAgeFromZombies age:integer

       and just creating a migration class. I'm a little confused on the whole thing honestly.

<Boiler plate excuse for not posting in a while>

So a colleague of mine was gracious enough to lend me her Macbook Air ,which doesn't get much use, for the next few months as I prep for applying as an intern at engineering. 

I've spent the spare time at work today trying to get the environment setup but am running in to issues with Homebrew. This will likely be remedied with a healthy dose of @jarsen, the resident brew doctor here. 

Beyond that I've been doing mostly Rails work and have a few observations:

There is no way around the "what the fu##" phase of learning a new framework. I immediately did the Michael Hartl tutorial when I decided to focus on Rails and it was a LOT of information to soak up. 

If at first you don't understand what's going on in the Code School course,  briefly check out another more basic resource then get back to it. I would've understood much more of the aforementioned tutorial with Rails for Zombies and Rails for Zombies 2 under my belt first. 

Build more than one simple instance of your new framework. I only did one or two quick Rails apps before jumping to the Hartl book's twitter site build. I would've understood the framework better had I started with more simpler instances.

Hit your new framework from a lot of angles or a "combo attack" as Landon Wilkins calls it. For Rails I only did Hartl's tutorial and appreciated it, but now I see how much better I learn when I do a combination of Code School, Code TV, Rails Casts, and another book simultaneously. 

Here's my script for the fourth Euler Problem, http://projecteuler.net/problem=4 .The first time I wrote this I thought I was pretty hot stuff for figuring it out in about 20 minutes only to realize that I had just found what the largest palindrome of any integer from 0 to 998001. My error was not finding the largest palindrome that was a product* of two three digit numbers. 

After finishing the gist I decided to run the script for larger factors, these are my results:

For three digit factors the time is approximately 4.37 s

So this weekend I took a solid stab at outlining my text adventure game, what it should and shouldn't do, and how much time I want it to take me. 

It's going to be a text adventure game where you're a new hire at my company, Instructure, and you see the CEO get kidnapped by pandas. Pandas are our company mascot FYI.

I want this project to be a month long commitment and have a finished product on github by the end of May. I'm using my roommate Jason and some other mentors to help with structuring my code. My first hurdle will be to switch from my book's model which is nested classes, to separating everything out in to it's own class.

I haven’t been coding for a long time but I’ve probably written around a few thousand lines of code up to this point. Of that I bet only about 500 lines were unique, and I ended up rewriting a lot of code over and over again.

Today I learned how to properly import code written in other files using require and load. The difference between the two is that load is more of an instantaneous event, allowing you to repeatedly run whatever it’s loading. Require is a one-time event. load can be useful if you’re going to be pulling from a class that might be changing, but this doesn’t sound very clean. Better off have a class somewhere that stays the same and just require it once.

What is this?

On recommendation I created this blog to chronicle my work to learn software development. I currently plan to post goals, accomplishments, frustrations, victories and anything that seems pertinent to my work.

A little about me:

I'm a 23 year old student and employee who is seeking to join the ranks of what I see as the most exciting career field available: software development. I was accepted in to a formal training school for web development but approached a few mentors regarding other options due to financial constraints with attending this school. In one of these chats the idea of a blog was given to me to help me along the way.

Where are we going?

We're going to Oz! No but seriously, it seems just as ethereal to me to enter the world of software development as it was to Dorothy to travel to a wizard in my opinion.

A career. A calling. A passion. Call it what you want but I've set my sights on championing the skills required to make the digital world around us function. 

When do we start?