I finally finished Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby this morning! w00t! The second half of that book was pretty hard and above my head, but I powered through.
I felt it was a good experience for me to read POODR at my level (7 months of coding experience). I got exposed to new concepts in basic OOD and just tried to let them 'wash over me' at this point even if I had poor grasp on what they really mean. I'm not sure if it would have been productive to attempt this book earlier than I did. I know I've gotten something out of it this first read, but can't wait for the next time I read it. I'm going to go ahead and put on my calendar to re-read POODR again in 2-3 months. It will be interesting to see how more I can understand or, at least, see what starts to sink in through re-reading it? :-)
I also listened to the second part of Sandi's interview on the CodeNewbies podcast. The parts of her interview I really enjoyed was when she spoke of only comparing yourself to yourself (and no one else) when you are judging your progress and learning. And that maybe we all should take a little breather from being so connected and online all the time... I believe in that too. It's one thing that I miss about living in the US and taking camping trips to very rural areas... where there is no way to access the internet because there's no service. It forces you to take a brief sabbatical from not only the internet but also tv and media in general. Frankly, I've been feeling a bit mentally overdrawn lately and can't wait to finally be on a vacation in a couple months. Being completely cut off from the internet and media for a week is one of the main reasons that I'm really looking forward to my vacation.
I've also been tackling the RubyKoans tasks. It's kinda addicting and most of the exercises can be completed pretty quickly. There are 282 TDD oriented tasks to complete in the program. In the past week, I've worked on/off during my commute and I've completed 216 out of the 282. I think they are fun, but I also like testing, and I'm comfortable with it.
Since I've been doing the RubyKoans, I'm rocking a 24 day streak on GitHub! I know that doesn't means anything to anyone else, but it means something to me.... I'm coding something I find meaningful, even if small, everyday.
Slowly getting through the Treehouse jQuery exercises. I find it harder to get through the treehouse stuff since it is all video-based. It's just not as convenient to do when I have time (that is mainly, on the train, during my commute), since I would have to remember to download the videos beforehand. I just have to accept I will be going through their lessons at a slower rate. I will keep working through the lessons when I have time.
Next up, I'm going to tackle learning SQL. And for reading, I'm planning on starting Eloquent Ruby. And hopefully finding some time on the weekends to collaborate on a Rails API / ReactJS app...
Tuesday, June 30, 2015
Saturday, June 13, 2015
June 13: Dabbling in Elixir, more jQuery, more Ruby.
I didn't do much coding outside of work during the week. Work has been fine, I feel like I'm progressing at a good rate, but outside of work, it was a rough week, so I couldn't put in much effort to coding during my free time.
But, I did spend late night friday/early saturday morning working through a Elixir tutorial that I had been wanting to tackle for a few weeks. I successful went through it pretty quickly and got a fairly simple CRUD quotes app working perfectly locally. However, I spent more time than that trying to get the deployment to Heroku (not in the tutorial) to work and failed.
To make sure it wasn't me or a dev environment issue (didn't figure it was, since it was running perfectly locally, but did it for a sanity check...), I cloned another sample elixir app and quickly set it up and deployed it easily, so I think based on the heroku error logs that there's some maybe dependencies issue going on. It's kinda weird working with such a new framework like Phoenix, where it is so new that you git clone the framework directly onto your machine to use it. For this specific tutorial, I was git checking out a specific branch with an older version of the framework to use... and maybe in deployment that's getting jacked. I think maybe this is where my issue lies, but I'm not sure. I gave up on trying to fix this project's deployment, I'd rather spend time learning something else or doing my own independent project to practice that waste more time on this one. I'm glad there was this tutorial to do, but I wish it would have spent a lot less time on making the CSS snazzy and instead go through the deployment process. I'd like some reassurance that this app was successfully deployed with its specific config settings even if it visually looks ugly! :-/
Today, I also finished up another segment in the Treehouse jQuery course. I'm 1/2 through that course. It's hard jumping back into studying something like jQuery with several days of break in between. Takes a while to get my head back in it.
I'm still slowing reading POODR, probably 3/4 through it. It's getting more difficult to keep up at the end. But, I'm just trying not to get hung up on every little thing that's over my head and power through for now, since I plan to re-read it again in a few months.
I constantly feel like I need to keep pushing to learn and try out other languages like JS or elixir and not be solely vested in Ruby, since who knows if/when Ruby on Rails is going fade into the background. But after experimenting with Elixir, it's clear that I really do love coding in Ruby. It's just such a readable and pretty language, I'm not sure how you couldn't like it. I'm really glad that I started out my coding adventure with Ruby and Rails. And I'm happy it's what I work with, at least for now.
But, I did spend late night friday/early saturday morning working through a Elixir tutorial that I had been wanting to tackle for a few weeks. I successful went through it pretty quickly and got a fairly simple CRUD quotes app working perfectly locally. However, I spent more time than that trying to get the deployment to Heroku (not in the tutorial) to work and failed.
To make sure it wasn't me or a dev environment issue (didn't figure it was, since it was running perfectly locally, but did it for a sanity check...), I cloned another sample elixir app and quickly set it up and deployed it easily, so I think based on the heroku error logs that there's some maybe dependencies issue going on. It's kinda weird working with such a new framework like Phoenix, where it is so new that you git clone the framework directly onto your machine to use it. For this specific tutorial, I was git checking out a specific branch with an older version of the framework to use... and maybe in deployment that's getting jacked. I think maybe this is where my issue lies, but I'm not sure. I gave up on trying to fix this project's deployment, I'd rather spend time learning something else or doing my own independent project to practice that waste more time on this one. I'm glad there was this tutorial to do, but I wish it would have spent a lot less time on making the CSS snazzy and instead go through the deployment process. I'd like some reassurance that this app was successfully deployed with its specific config settings even if it visually looks ugly! :-/
Today, I also finished up another segment in the Treehouse jQuery course. I'm 1/2 through that course. It's hard jumping back into studying something like jQuery with several days of break in between. Takes a while to get my head back in it.
I'm still slowing reading POODR, probably 3/4 through it. It's getting more difficult to keep up at the end. But, I'm just trying not to get hung up on every little thing that's over my head and power through for now, since I plan to re-read it again in a few months.
I constantly feel like I need to keep pushing to learn and try out other languages like JS or elixir and not be solely vested in Ruby, since who knows if/when Ruby on Rails is going fade into the background. But after experimenting with Elixir, it's clear that I really do love coding in Ruby. It's just such a readable and pretty language, I'm not sure how you couldn't like it. I'm really glad that I started out my coding adventure with Ruby and Rails. And I'm happy it's what I work with, at least for now.
Sunday, June 7, 2015
Progress Update: Learning jQuery, Studying OO Design...
I've been spending most of my commute time reading Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby. I'm 2/3 of the way through it. Some concepts are harder than others to understand, but I'm ok with that. I'm sure I'll be re-reading this book again in 6 months. I've been learning about agile dev, duck typing, inheritance, etc. I really love how Sandi presents concepts. I've also watched some of her podcast appearances (like on Talking Code) and her RailsConf 2015 talk ("Nothing is something") and can recommend them all. She is inspiring to me... She reminds me of my unofficial mentor at my last job/career... an incredibly intelligent female who I could only wish to be as smart as one day!
I'm slowly moving through the Treehouse JavaScript courses. I finished up the JS fundamental courses and moved onto the jQuery course over the weekend. I have been having a hard time finding the time to work on these courses during the work week.
I'm slowly moving through the Treehouse JavaScript courses. I finished up the JS fundamental courses and moved onto the jQuery course over the weekend. I have been having a hard time finding the time to work on these courses during the work week.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)