Tuesday, July 31, 2012

Guard testing? Has anyone ever heard of it?

I've discovered it from the Hartl tutorial and I'm considering skipping that part. Has any one ever used Guard in a professional context?

A List of Ruby and Rails Tutorials

I'm building a list of tutorials. Some emphasize Ruby, some Rails. I'll add them as I find them, so stay tuned.

RAILS
  • Rails Guides, beginner. You build a blog. You can build it out or try to adopt the format to building your own app. 
  • Michael Hartl's tutorial.  Considered by most of the people in my community to be the most comprehensive online tutorial out there. 
RUBY


Monday, July 30, 2012

What I'm working on today...

Writing tests in Rspec in the Hartl tutorial, now on to refactoring...

gotta love the RSpec green, ok and the red too. ;)

Saturday, July 28, 2012

How Does One Demonstrate a "Passion" for Coding?

I had a potential employer tell me a few months back that I was "not passionate" about writing code. What they didn't know is that:

1) I also need to keep working in my current field (which I also love doing, but happens to not be coding) to support myself.
2) I have actually been working on learning for a year with minimal paid work so that I can make time to code and become proficient.
3) I have been working on sharpening coding skills other than just Ruby. It is my belief that diversity in knowledge and skills is a strength, not a clear indication of a lack of passion.
4) I lead two co-working study group meetups per week to surround myself with other coders who have similar goals and want to focus on social coding, sometimes we focus on RoR, sometimes we are language agnostic.

If this doesn't prove otherwise -- at least a little -- I don't know what will. Oh, except writing my own app, which I am also doing. ;)

Stepping Back into the Hartl Turtorial

Nearly Everyone I know in The Ruby on Rails Community I am involved with recommends Michael Hartl's tutorial. Many of them get hung up on chapter 3, as I did. Time to go back and pick it up again, to muck my way through it...while I am also working on updating my CSS skills by doing some of the exercises in CSS: the Missing Manual. An excellent book by the way.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

a very simple app.

The beginnings of a very simple booking app I am building. Someone told me that going from tutorials to building your own app is the biggest step. http://vivid-day-9010.herokuapp.com

Gathering User Input in Ruby

http://www.maryfjenn.com/samples/userinput.html