Trails to Rails

The weekend was really well spent at Code Cloud with many other Code Academy students.  As always, I wish I would have made more progress and paired with more people.  That said, I’m really close to have all the working parts for the bones of my Bike to Work Week app.  Big gains this weekend:

1. Discovered Twitter Bootstrap, which took my app from -1000 to 20 in terms of style in a matter of 2 hours.
2. Discovered Turntable.fm, which allowed me to waste time feeling pressured to some up with great songs that wouldn’t make me look like the old fogey in the crowd.  I did, anyways.
3. Made a few database migrations to extend my model as needed for functionality.
4. Refactored code so that significant logic is out of the views, and some logic is now at the application level.
5. Added a Facebook Share.  Social share #1, with lots more to come.  My whole app is based on the idea that people will want to share their accomplishments as much as possible.
6. Got locked out of Code Cloud doing a Red Bull run.
7. Got let back in an hour later.
8. Did my first inner join.  It’s not as dirty as it sounds.  This one was a little tough.  I wanted to get a list of objects where that object had at least one row in a tavle with a has_many association.  I ended up with the following steps:

• Do a query to get all the id’s that matched my criteria - ended up with array of id’s.
• Created an empty array and pushed the object relating to each id into the new array, so that I ended up with objects that I could call upon for their attributes.

I pushed all my new stuff to Heroku, including the database.  Now I’ve got to finish up the main functionality, and start trying to make this thing look presentable.

Also have to think about what I’m going to talk about for my 3 minutes on Demo Day.

I can’t believe it’s been 6 weeks, and Code Academy is half over.  I am disappointed in myself that I haven’t spent as much time coding and studying as I should be.  That said, I’m still keeping up in class pretty well, and I’ve made a little progress on my app.  I spent at least 20 hours coding last weekend, planning to study on Saturday and work on my app Sunday.  Saturday morning, I woke up to a practice challenge from Raghu Betina, and ended up working on that all weekend.  I’m sure it wasn’t a waste of time, but at the end of the weekend, I kind of wished I could have it back…

Goals for the rest of the week:

1. Review the user authentication code we created last week in class.
2. Get through Ch 4 of Rails Hartl tutorial.
3. Knock out 3 user stories for my Chicago Commuter Challenge app.

Hold me to it!!

At the end of last week, I was starting to feel a little dangerous.  I built a web-enabled app that showed a list of things, allowed functionality to add/update/delete the items in the list, and display details — all database-driven!  This felt awesome.  Until I started to work on my own app.

I should clarify.  I have decided to work on 2 apps:  (1) Monitor Mania.  This is an app for work that will power the TV monitor we have for HomeFinder employees.  We show slides with stats and consumer feedback, and it plays a cowbell sound when a sale goes through our billing system, powered by Recurly.  I intend to re-write it, while also adding Google Analytics data, sales data, and maybe some more practical items like train schedules or something.

The second app I plan to build is a leaderboard for Active Transportation Alliance’s Commuter Challenge.  It will be a dynamically updated scoreboard that the public can use to see how companies are stacking up against each other during Bike to Work Week here in Chicago.  The idea is to create motivation for Team Leaders and participants.  I also plan to hook it up with social media so that participants easily can share their accomplishments, promote Active Trans, and comment on the leaderboard to create excitement.  The few Chicago cyclists I’ve shared the idea with think it really fills a need, so I have that going for me… which is nice.

So today I thought I would attempt to apply my knowledge to deploy a very basic part of the Monitor Mania app to the world via Heroku.  The reason I decided to concentrate on deployment today was because I think it will be important to share my progress with my sponsor and my mentor, and this seemed to be the best way to do that.  In addition, now that I know the scaffold command, I’m kind of at the point where I don’t know what to practice with regards to ruby.  For example, for my apps, I will need multiple models and different data types, and we haven’t learned that stuff yet in class.

So… I created a new app using scaffold, and thought I wouldn’t try to customize too much, and instead just focus on getting the ugly thing live.  My steps:

1. Installed heroku and command line client
2. Changed the database from sqlite3 to PostgreSQL
3. Changed the server from Webrick to Thin
4. e-installed bundles
5. Used Git versioning to get the code ready to push
6. Deployed the code

I tried to access my app via http://monitormania.herokuapp.com/slides, but that didn’t work.  I get a 500 error.  I tried to troubleshoot by running the app locally, but now it seems pissed that I’m not using sqlite3 anymore.

I’ve got some work to do.

In a couple ways, the first day of Code Academy reminded me of my first day of cutlery sales training at Cutco / Vector Marketing when I was 19 years old:

1. The room was full of alumni and recruits drunk on the kool-aid.  Hell, there was one guy with a tattoo of the Code Academy logo on his leg!
2. I learned a couple solid skills in less than one day.  At Cutco, I learned how to use a chef’s knife properly.  This skill has been invaluable in my adult life.  At Code Academy on Monday, I learned some basic Terminal commands, and that command-R is a shortcut for refreshing browser on a Mac.  I am on my way.

In more ways than not, this was nothing like Cutco:

1. I’ve bought into the program, and I’m super-geeked to learn web development and become a builder - I won’t be pulling a “cut” ‘n’ run.  (Get it?)
2. Instead of selling tools, I’ll be building them.  Awesome.

By the end of this week, I will accomplish these goals:

1. Pair-program with at least 3 new people, whose names I will burn into my memory.
2. Complete my assigned reading in Apprenticeship Patterns by Dave Hoover and Adewale Oshineye.
3. Initiate my new blog (Trails to Rails) and published my first blog post.
4. Install Rails via RVM and posted my first web app project to GitHub.
5. Work through the first 4 chapters of Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl.
6. Setup a schedule for myself for the next 12 weeks to ensure I am allotting the proper amount of time to HomeFinder.com (work), CA assignments/readings/projects/networking, sleep, exercise, friends, family, and my husband (not in that order).
7. Figure out how to center the Code Academy logo below in Tumblr.  (I edited the HTML easily with the <center> tag using the HTML Source Editor, but for some reason, it’s not saving when I click “Update” - what am I doing wrong?)