Ruby and Coffee

When I first started out using git and the command line, it was for very very basic usage. I could `cd` into directories, `ls` in directories, do a few Rails commands... and basically just follow instructions from online tutorials.

But I never fully explored exactly what commands I could use in the terminal - especially for Git.

So here’s a few commands that I use daily in my work... and I WISH I had just gone along and researched for a few years ago, because it took me way too long to discover them:

So perhaps you’re new to RSpec, and you’re kind of like “huh?”

Or perhaps you’ve been using RSpec for a while, but you’re pretty sure you can improve those tests that you’ve been writing.

For testing methods that need to make API requests, I’ll be using the VCR gem. I’ve heard of it loads before but haven’t really used it. And tomorrow*, I’ll be doing a tutorial!

With Rails + RSpec.

And I’ll be using this Movie Database API to do it!

https://www.themoviedb.org/documentation/api

So I was looking for a free alternative to Mandrill and I found this: postmarkapp.com

“A fast & reliable transactional-only email platform for web applications.”

It’s free up to 25,000 emails and then it’s $0.25 - $1.50 per thousand emails thereafter.

Through a heck of a lot of trial and error!

I went through a few different online tutorials, including “Ruby on Rails Tutorial” by Michael Hartl, and I just basically kept going through lots of different tutorials until I “sorta” understood Ruby on Rails.

Once I “sorta” understood it, I started to “sorta” do it, by testing what I’d learned through building my own applications.

It’s one thing to follow someone else’s tutorial and do what they say, but it’s another thing to go “okay, my app needs this functionality, so how do I do it?”

Tutorials are great for giving you a bit of direction, but eventually you’ll reach a stage where your brain just starts asking loads of questions, like “Why does X do that? How does it do it? Does Y do that too? What happens if I do this...”Answering those questions is always my favourite way to learn, and making huge mistakes “What have I done?! MY RAILS APP IS RUINED!” and trying to figure out the solution also helps you a hundredfold.

After a month or so, I reached the point where I could stop building lots of small applications (each of different functionalities) and start concentrating on one major application.

An example of this could be an app where you’ve got user authentication and authorisation, messaging between users, following other users, having a search engine to “search” for users (via name, email, etc), adding a payment gateway to sell items between users, having friendly_id make your URLs a bit prettier... the list goes on. But if you can put one big app together, and juggle all that logic and data simultaneously, while making sure all functionalities play nicely with each other, it really starts to give you a big confidence boost. 

After 4-6 months, I started to learn about topics that weren’t in the ‘beginner’ tutorials anymore. Things like test-driven development, Redis, background jobs... I swear, just as you gain a bit of confidence, Rails puts you straight back in your place. But that’s okay, because at least you’re constantly learning.

I also created this blog. Initially it was just so that I could write the solution to a bug that I had (so I could refer to it next time I got the bug), but then it turned into full tutorials that I’d write to remind myself of vital stages the next time I tried to do something similar.This really helped as it also got me in contact with other Rails developers and gave me a chance to help out other beginners (often learning something new along the way!).

I’m now at the stage where I can start contributing to the Github community, help others out in their projects and start creating my own Ruby gems.I also feel confident enough to work as a full-time Ruby on Rails developer - because I always know that if there’s something I don’t understand, I only have to spend a day researching and then I’ll understand it :)

If anyone has any questions about Ruby on Rails (or HTML, CSS, JS, jQuery...) then feel free to send me a message :) 

Let’s say you have a form, and you’ve written:

<%= form_for (@form, @field) do |f| %>

Well, I’m sorry to say that this is wrong - and the error is being caused by those parentheses.

Instead, you need square brackets, like so:

<%= form_for [@form, @field] do |f| %>

So you originally told Rails to create an Article table for you, and accidentally asked it to make the content with the ‘string’ datatype?

Dumb.

No worries! To fix it (and change it to ‘text’), do the following:

1. Create a new migration:

$ rails g migration change_column_type

2. Within the newly generated migration file, fill it with:

class ChangeColumnType < ActiveRecord::Migration  

def self.up       change_table :articles do |t|           t.change :content, :text    end   end   def self.down       change_table :articles do |t|           t.change :content, :string       end   end

end

3. As usual after a migration...

$ rake db:migrate

This is going to be a fairly brief tutorial because I’m moving to England next week and I’m very, very busy... So let’s get going!

I’ll be showing you some code in this tutorial to aid your understanding but for the full repository, see this link on my github: https://github.com/rubyandcoffee/rspec-calculator

First of all, let’s start with understanding exactly what Test-Driven Development and Behaviour-Driven Development actually is.

Test-Driven Development (”TDD”):

Your app is going to have a bunch of functionalities, but before we code those functionalities, we first need to write a test for the functionality. Of course, it will initially fail because we haven’t actually written the functionality yet. Then, we write the code which adds the functionality, and finally we run the test to ensure that it passes.

Behaviour-Driven Development (”BDD”):

This naturally stems from TDD, but here we’re not only testing what the method or object is, we’re also testing its behaviour - i.e. what it does. You’ll see in the code that the acceptance tests are written as structured sentences, like a story, which puts a real emphasis on exactly what the code does, e.g. “As a [role] I want [feature] so that [benefit].”

This may sound confusing, but bear with me.

So where does RSpec and Capybara fit into all of this?

RSpec

Essentially RSpec is a library/framework for BDD testing. The example sentence I listed before with the “role, feature and benefit” is where RSpec comes into play. RSpec allows you to write tests for your code (called ‘specs’) which test the expected behaviour for a given method in your program.

Example:

I want to write a calculator that sums two numbers together. But first, I have to write a test to check that the calculator sums the two numbers correctly!

So let’s have a look at my code for the spec (the test).

https://gist.github.com/rubyandcoffee/d44b9f537acb18bd13889ed4eb4d7a04

First we ‘describe’ the class (StringCalculator) and the method (.add), then we give it a context (given two numbers), then a further context (the two numbers being 2, 4) and describe what it is supposed to do (it returns 6) and what we expect it to return (expect 2 + 4 to equal 6). 

Pretty easy, right?

And then here’s the actual method that this spec would link to:

https://gist.github.com/rubyandcoffee/172ddae4f018333c65081db56925a49f

This is a simple if statement where if the string is empty, return 0, else split the string (into separate numbers), convert to integers, and then sum the numbers together and return it.

That’s all you need to know as a beginner, and if you want to see the full Rails app then my repo is here: https://github.com/rubyandcoffee/rspec-calculator

Now let’s go onto a brief description of Capybara.

Capybara

Consider this like an add-on, or an extension, to RSpec. It cannot work independently so we’ll use it with RSpec.

As I mentioned before, think of RSpec as just a library that allows you to do those sentences within a spec that tests a class. 

So now think of Capybara as an extension to that library - an extension that simulates the real user interaction of your application. What do users do? They click buttons, fill in forms, etc... and Capybara lets you test those elements of your app.

If a user wants to sign up, they’ll first have to create an account using their email and password, then they’ll have to be redirected to the appropriate sign in page, where they’ll have to submit their sign in credentials before being led to another page that confirms they have successfully logged in.

This is what Capybara tests for. See the code below:

https://gist.github.com/rubyandcoffee/a47e1ae8797f53d4dd461a2dad3b7d37

And that’s the end of the tutorial! Sorry if it was a bit short, I’m just incredibly busy lately and I promise that I’ll come back and refactor it a little! 

In the meantime, please continue to send in your suggestions for future blog tutorials :)

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So so sorry for the lack of tutorials lately... you know what life is like.

But I’ve got an EXCITING UPDATE - I’m starting a YouTube channel with coding tutorials aimed at girls, but guys you’re all free to watch of course.

Anyway, I’m shooting my first video tomorrow... so I’ll supply you with a link and more details soon.

Surprisingly, it will mostly be about JavaScript/jQuery, because I really need to knuckle down on my JS skills. But there will probably be a few Ruby on Rails videos because I just can’t resist... and a few on SASS.

Lastly, here’s a link to my Twitter - http://twitter.com/rubyandcoffee

But the bloody electricity went out when I was half-way through the last post, so let’s try again...

THREDDED is a pretty sweet ruby gem for building forums, and I’ll be making one later tonight and giving you all the saucy details (aka “tutorial”).

https://github.com/thredded/thredded

There’s a couple themes for it (light + dark):

Its last commit was 3 days ago, so it looks pretty promising :)

Find out more here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/single-mother-jessica-kill-has-three-months-to-raise-150000-to-pay-for-her-own-life-saving-surgery-a7022851.html

“A British mother-of-two says she has three months to raise £150,00 for pay for life-saving surgery only on offer in the United States.

Jessica Kill, 38, from Birmingham was diagnosed with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS) two years ago - a rare hereditary condition that affects sufferers' heart rate, blood pressure and digestion.

She has now found she is also suffering from the related conditions of chiari and craniocervical instability which, if untreated, will kill her.”

While this is not related to Ruby on Rails, Javascript is still important (if not essential) for you to know for a career in web development.

With that in mind, here’s a list of websites that have JS interview questions:

https://www.toptal.com/javascript/interview-questions

http://www.tutorialspoint.com/javascript/javascript_interview_questions.htm

https://www.codementor.io/javascript/tutorial/21-essential-javascript-tech-interview-practice-questions-answers

https://www.interviewcake.com/javascript-interview-questions

https://medium.com/javascript-scene/10-interview-questions-every-javascript-developer-should-know-6fa6bdf5ad95#.d7uz6uslo (scroll down to 1/3 of the page for the interview questions)

http://insights.dice.com/2015/07/02/interview-qs-for-jquery/?icid=ON_DN_UP_JS_AV_OG_RA_2

[x] Here’s a link for thorough information on Ruby (and Rails) naming conventions (for controllers, models, tables, etc).

Allow me to introduce to you my new favourite Ruby gem: chosen-rails.

Link to Official Chosen website (with demos/examples)

Link to Chosen Github (source code)

Link to Chosen integration with Rails (Github source code)

The gem has a few functionalities, and tbh I’ve been wondering where other applications get these *functionalities* from. Well, apparently they get them from the Chosen gem!

Chosen does a few things, but the general gist of it is that it makes select boxes (drop downs, etc) much more user-friendly (and beautiful!).

Here’s some screenshots from their website:

Let’s summarise:

- Current gem version: 1.5.2 - Website: https://harvesthq.github.io/chosen/ - Github page: https://github.com/harvesthq/chosen - For Rails integration: https://github.com/tsechingho/chosen-rails