#w5d2

Okay so my horrible SIL and her boyfriend (that have been together for like 3 month or so) is coming by in 3 hours. She always comes when I have 12 hour nights. It’s incredible.

Anyways. My boyfriend is sure it’s because she wants to tell she’s pregnant 🙄 She already got one child she cannot take care of - and she’s not even moved in with her new boyfriend yet.

I literally cannot deal with having children born that close. 😱 We’ll have to move! 😂👌🏻

Her and I have a pretty tense relationship to begin with, because I am judging her incapability to take care of her son and I think she lacks respect for other people - she thinks I’m a bitch.

In episode 131 Vector said he recorded a million times where Nasch pissed him off.  Since none of these were elaborated on in canon, give us examples of what might have been on Vector’s list.

I woke up at 5 AM today to do the practice assessment at least one more time before the actual assessment. I finally managed to get it under just two hours. Feeling doomed, I went in and used my hour of study hall to do the assessment one more. I managed to have 12 specs failing by the time the real assessment started, and I figured that wasn't too bad. It meant if I did well enough, I could probably have enough time to spare to wittle it down if circumstances were really bad.

In the end... I passed completely! With extra time to spare! I basically had it all down in about 70 minutes, and the 30 minutes or so was just debugging a couple of persistent errors by using launchy's save_and_open_page feature, debugger, and staying calm remembering a few wise words from a person from the previous cohort.

Definitely for me, having someone go over the potential debugging tools I have and using them first-hand really helps reinforce for me that I should use it, and that often leads to me using it way more. I like to think once I know and see how to debug, debugging is one of my stronger points. One of my weaker points is probably absorbing material quick and churning it out.

Regardless, this assessment went really well for me, and once I fixed that one bug preventing my last 5 specs from passing, I was sure it had to be a mistake - so I screenshoted my result alongside the assessment timer page, and went to talk to Daniel, but it turns out he had already graded my test and he confirmed it all passed. Yay! That put me in a very good mood today for the first time in...... hmm. A long time actually. :|

The rest of the day was a chance to catch up on material and also start on Javascript. I think this is going to be a tough one... I've been struggling through the material, and even wrote a simple program that'll convert input from the Ruby method into Javascript's equivalents, as well as it also giving you some helpful tips on certain Javascript methods. We'll see how useful that ends up being.

I hope I get a partner tomorrow who also isn't super clear on Javascript. I know there are a few people who already know it and are with it, I feel like they'd just end up feeling like things are going to slow and I don't get it if we are paired.

Today I Learned: how Rails handles request/responses.

We had an assessment in the morning. It was harder than I expected. I did well. After assessment, we had a lecture on the request/response cycle from client --> server --> client. There are many steps involving various layers of converting the request/response before we end up with the end response. We talked about Rack, the middleware, used in Rails.

Today was a pretty big day at App Academy. Our project was to create Rails Lite, a lite version of Rails that includes a Router, a ControllerBase class with which to write controllers, and logic within ControllerBase to render .erb views, redirect the client to other pages on the app, and set the session cookie. All of this was written in conjunction with Rail's Rack class, which provides us with Request and Response classes. To use these classes, we first start a Rack server with Rack::Server.start and pass in our app along with the port through which we want to be able to connect to it. Then, within our app, we can pass Rack::Request.new the env object provided by Rack::Server.start, which creates a Request object on which we can call methods to determine the contents of the client's request. Then, through the internal logic of our app, we build up a Rack::Response object, which we finally call .finish on when we are ready to respond to the client.

After finishing up the required sections of the Rails Lite project, I moved on to the bonuses, where I implemented flash and an ExceptionCatcher middleware. In Rails, flash is a method within controller with which we can access and set key-value pairs within the client's cookie that will persist only through the next response cycle. Thus, if I write flash[:errors] = "Bad stuff" in one of my controller actions, when that action is executed, flash[:errors] will still return "Bad stuff" during the next response cycle, but will be nil thereafter (unless it is set again, of course). To implement this functionality, I set a flash cookie on the client, which I stored as a hash serialized to JSON. Then, when a controller calls flash for the first time during a response cycle, it sets a @flash instance variable to the deserialized values of that cookie.

However, Rails also has a flash.now method, which works just like flash, except that key-value pairs set with it will only persist during the current response cycle, and will be gone by the next cycle. To implement this functionality, my Flash class sets an instance variable @flash_now to true whenever .now is called on it, which causes it to temporarily respond to any methods immediately called on it by using instance variables, rather than the values store in the cookie. Then, @flash_now is set back to false, causing all further calls to flash to function appropriately.