Saturday night.

coding in bed.

Here's how I spent my Saturday late night.... In bed, working on coding while reading Kehoe's learn rails guide. 

So far, I think I liked one month rails' style better for my learning style, but I'm doing the best I can!  I worked on integrating a contact form into my app using simple_forms and google_drive gems.

Learn Rails Tutorial started!

I started Daniel Kehoe's Learn Rails book on Tuesday.  I'm excited to do this tutorial!  I decided to do it before starting Hartl's Rails tutorial to get more practice and because the application I will be building during the book will be suitable for a small business... it includes contact form and mailing list features.  This will be great since the first independent project I'm going to take on is making a new website for my dad's business!

I got through chaper 12, setting up my new project and getting git setup along the way, and then got stuck for hours on the dumbest mistake ever.  I'm pretty embarassed that I wasted my evening on such a silly error.  I was editing my .bashrc file and secrets.yml file in the app to setup environment variables in the bash file so they aren't revealed in the secrets.yml file.  I kept getting one of two errors:  my secret_key_base wasn't defined in the secrets.yml file and an error similar to this one: "ruby/2.1.0/psych.rb:370:in `parse': (<unknown>): could not find expected ':' while scanning a simple key at line 18 column 1 (Psych::SyntaxError)"

After systematically going through replacing variables in secrets.yml file with hard values, checking the multiple bash files on my computer for conflicts (bash_profile, bashrc, profile, zshrc, etc), I finally found the problem and felt so dumb.  When I was opening up my bash files, I was just clicking them in Finder and the default textEdit program for Mac was opening them instead of opening them in my text editor, Atom.  So, the problem was, that the textEdit program was adding formatting that couldn't be interpreted properly by my computer.  DUMB!  Once I went through them and re-did my bashrc file in Atom, it all works!

I could continue to beat myself up for making this mistake, but it is better to laugh at it and learn, and never make it again!

XCode, HomeBrew, RVM, Ruby, Rails.... wheee!

Set up my dev environment today.  Wow, was that frustrating!

I had a slew of error messages but luckily with googling, stackoverflow, and some uninstalling/reinstalling Xcode and RVM and updating OpenSSL, I finally got everything installed by following the RailApps Tutorial.  Whew.  I am learning about how to use a Mac (long-time PC user until a year ago when Win8 changed my mind) alongside learning how to be a developer!

Glad I accomplished this today, I was so disappointed this morning when I was trying to figure it out and I kept getting 3 different error messages.  This took me most of the day to figure out and finish the install, but it's done and working as far as I know!