ruby

Agile Web Development in Rails 4

Book Notes Instead of being asleep at 19:04 on 5 May 2015, kitt created this:

Okay, I read this one again, since the first reading was before I knew what things were and why I was doing things and oh, god, what have I gotten myself into? Helps to have development under your belt for these things.

This book was recommended to me as the book to learn Rails development. It has two main sections: a hands-on let's-build-a-rails-app section, and a here-are-the-explanations section. The first is designed to guide you through building an application with Rails, the second to explain what the hell just happened and how all the parts fit together. The book builds a slight e-commerce platform: a store's product display / catalog, administration section, shopping cart, checkout and user authentication. The example is great, I definitely liked that it wasn't a blog or a twitter client.

The book is good and it works. It is not the book for new developers, however. It uses a lot of words and concepts without explaining them, assuming the reader knows what they mean. And this is okay. The book is for a developer who is learning Rails. It does that well.

Time-wise, if you're going to read the book and do the exercises (say, a new employer is giving you a chance to come up to speed with Rails, or the first couple weeks of work to learn), give yourself 2 work weeks to go through it. You can do it faster (you can always do things faster), but doing the exercises and typing things in and playing around with things relevant-to but not part-of the lessons is what makes learning better. So, yeah, play around, poke around, learn something outside the lesson for greater good.

This would be my Rails Rant of the Day

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 17:50 on 14 March 2015

Okay, I know that using rails is supposed to make one's life easier. I recognize that convention over code rules the rails mindset. I even completely agree that rails devs don't feel pain when they develop applications, with all the various pieces kindly hidden from them. That is great. Good for them / us / me.

But, come on, this?

No, not "come on." More like, "COME THE FUCK ON, WHAT THE FUCKING HELL?"

Have ruby irb console save history

Blog Instead of being asleep at 14:22 on 11 March 2015, kitt created this:

Add this to your ~/.irbrc file (creating one if it doesn't already exist):

require 'irb/ext/save-history'
IRB.conf[:SAVE_HISTORY] = 200
IRB.conf[:HISTORY_FILE] = "#{ENV['HOME']}/.irb-history"

Boom! Last 200 commands are saved, such that you can up arrow / command-p or down arrow / command-n to move through your ruby console history!

Whoo!

How many different ways can you miss the ternary?

Blog Written with a loving hand by kitt some time around 08:21 on 4 December 2014

Yeah, so, I can totally recognize ternary operators when they are of the ? : format:

shadow = shadow.nil?  ? create_shadow() : shadow;

Yes, it's a shortcut for some variant of

if (shadow == nil) {
  shadow = create_shadow();
} else {
  // like anyone would do this
  shadow = shadow;
}

When they are of the if syntax, though, wow, does this read poorly to me:

shadow = if is_shadowing?(master)
       master.enable_shadow
     else
       master.disable_shadow
     end

And, yet, this is valid syntax in ruby, and most ruby developers are "Sure, that looks fine."

Specify local gem in Gemfile

Snippet Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 13:20 on 23 July 2014

Specify a specific ruby gem file to use, typically development and local, instead of the default installed version.

gem "foo", :path => "/path/to/foo"

This was supposed to be easy

Blog Yeah, kitt finished writing this at 19:06 on 25 April 2014

So, in interviewing for a job as a front end developer (awwwwwwwww yisssssssssss, automate all the things front end!), I ended up excited about a company that uses Rails (and Ruby) as their application framework. When I was asked, "How would you feel about never writing another line of code in PHP?" I responded, "I'd be okay with it." Languages are ways to communicate, with PHP being just one dialect. If I need to learn how to speak Ruby, *shrug* If the people are awesome, hand me the Ruby book.

Right, the Ruby book.

I'm heading through "Agile Web Development with Rails 4," as it was recommended by the director of engineering at the company. The contents indicate that it's a reasonable introduction to Ruby, which is great. Fortunately for me, I took Chookie's suggestion of problems from Project Euler to play around with languages. I'm currently solving my problems in PHP, JavaScript, Python and Ruby, so that Ruby isn't a blocker on the learning.

Great.

Except I have to say, the length of time it took me to get to this screen:

was stupidly too long.

Seriously, this file exists:

bash-3.2$ more /usr/bin/rails 
#!/bin/sh
echo 'Rails is not currently installed on this system. To get the latest version, simply type:'
echo
echo '    $ sudo gem install rails'
echo
echo 'You can then rerun your "rails" command.'

I really want to ask who thought having this was a good idea, when THIS is the correct response on every single flavor of *nix I can think of:

bash-3.2$ rails
bash: rails: command not found

I'm really glad I know what I'm doing on the command line, because the "oh, just run it with sudo before the command" really doesn't cut it. Really.

Hey, how about those PATH variables?

Right.

Okay, fine now. All set with the demo app. Hello, localhost:3000 (groan! that port will stay around maybe 2 chapters in, and then it's back to my numbering scheme).

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