A Jump Start on App Academy Blogging

The big thing about account activations was introducing mailers. There’s a fair bit of black magic required for the set up and getting all the config stuff right, but I think I understand whats going in the main parts of the mailers.

The part on password resets SHOULD have been mostly review, but it was actually very difficult for me. The pluralization conventions and the functions that return urls for different actions tripped me up quite a bit. I also misunderstood what assigns(:variable) did in tests and what the variable should refer to. I’m still a bit confused; integration tests aren’t associated with a specific controller, I thought, though convention seems to be to not use a single test to test too many things at once. So how does assigns() know where to get the instance variable from? 

More practice with forms is good, but they’re still a bit opaque to me. I’m not sure why they take the form (ha) that they do. Some of that is they’re part of the HTML/Rails interface, which I’m not as clear on.

The big new things was the BCrypt stuff and session and cookies. The BCrypt stuff is still black magic. I mean, it has to be to some extent; actually covering crypto would be a whole other book. But the way you work with it seems odd and counter-intuitive. In particular, I don’t understand why you test match a match hashed passwords/tokens the way you do. Likewise, the handling of the unhashed token seems strange, and I don’t know why it’s done that way.

The handling of sessions and cookies makes more sense. They seem to be (wrapped in) a fairly straightforward and familiar form, though as always I need practice applying it.

There’s a lot of testing in the chapter. It’s good practice, and I think I’m starting to understand what’s tested and how, particularly for post-hoc tests. I don’t think following a tutorial that tells you what tests to write is good practice for test-driven development, though, and I feel like I’ll need a lot of practice designing my own stuff to get good at that.

First, testing. I get the point of testing. And I understand in general how it's supposed to be done. But the actual syntax of all the different assert variations is black magic. I KNOW what I want to test for (in one case, and more or less in another case), but I don't know HOW to use assert_select (or any other assert) to test for it. I eventually figured out where it told me what to do, the specific syntax for the specific case, but I can't see any rhyme or reason to the syntax that I could use to write my own tests for anything except trivial variations of the same thing.

Which brings me to another point. To call these things "exercises" is stretching the definition. In some cases, its actually just "do this thing, and confirm that it works". That's not an exercise, that's more tutorial (except you have the excuse of an exercise to only explain what "works" actually means in the separate solutions guide). And even when it's not that, there's a lot of very specific exercises where they're almost entirely solved except for a tiny fill-in-the blank (which I tend to ignore initially, and try to write or at least think through the WHOLE solution, but still). 

Forms are another thing that I'm still struggling with, but I think I'm in better shape there than on the various assert methods and testing. I think practice is what's needed there.

Flash is in similar situation. Maybe a little less familiar. But it also just feels less important. Like, I need to really understand forms just to make a functioning web app. Flash is an important, convenient tool, but it's not a central part of the functionality, and it's also separate, something I can focus my attention on and add to my skill set separately. 

I'm not sure I understand what's generating the errors associated with an unsucessful signup.

Got more practice writing tests, and maybe actually understand how to use "assert".

The new thing in Chapter 3 is layouts, and how they interact with the views to create a default, well, layout.

Somehow I missed an entire portion of the Blogger tutorial related to editing posts. And my nice little app was broken.

It's fixed now. I did have to reread the tutorial to figure out the issue, but I still think playing around with the broken part taught me a fair bit (even though I initially did that wrong, too, and lost some of my progress on what I was actually planning to do).

First and obviously, I learned how to use git to roll back versions and search for where things went wrong.

Second, I learned more about how the controller interacts with the web interface, and why it takes two functions to create pages and edit pages (.new and .create or .edit and .update), with new/edit feeding information to generate the interface form, and create/update taking in information from the form to actually make changes in the database. And all that relates to params; you need one params (the article id) to generate a form to edit an article, and a different params (the new contents, which comes from the form). 

It was a lot of the same stuff from a different perspective: how Views work, and how they pass information to controllers. How forms work. But, like I said, more practice is what I needed.

There was the new thing about the belongs_to/has_many thing. I saw that in the Rails tutorial, too; it still seems like something I just have to treat as a black box.

One thing that confused me. We created the comment_params in the comment controller itself, not in the helper like we did with the article_params. The params functions are also still a little bit black box to me anyway, but it's not clear why did it one way one time and another way the other time. Worse, when I tried to move it to the helper, it stopped working, giving me an undefined local variable or method exception, as if they simple weren't there  (even with include CommentsHelper). I'm puzzled.