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.

Monday's progress.

With technology projects, like many other aspects of life, though it seems you’ll never get it right, and never get it done, there are moments when you can savor a sense of accomplishment. This is one of those moments. -Daniel Kehoe, Learn Rails Tutorial

Sunday's progress:

• Got mailer setup and working.
• Got site deployed to Heroku and working.
• Even though I was getting all this stuff done, troubleshooting and fixing stuff, I felt incredibly overwhelmed and confused again about controllers, views, and models.  
• Felt down because I was confused and felt like I didn't understand anything at all and felt like I hadn't learned anything in the tutorial, but just following instructions.

Today's progress:

• I got a good 4 hours of studying done at the library before it was time to go home and walk/feed the dogs.
• In that time, I re-read much of what I had just done/learned in the Learn Rails tutorial. 
• I googled A LOT.  Learning about RESTful design.  Learning about 'skinny controller, fat model.'  Looking up more about ActiveRecord, ActiveModel, ActionController & Mailer. Looking up about using render vs. redirect_to in the controller methods.
• Reading RubyDocs like "Rails routing from the outside in."
• When I got back home, I finished up the bulk of the tutorial, adding segment.io JS to create analytics via google analytics.  And pushed it to heroku and made sure it was working via checking the real-time analytics tracking.
• I feel a little less completely lost this evening.
• In the past few days, I've read over 250 pages (and re-read most of those) of the Learn Rails tutorial.  I have about 70 more pages to finish.

My One Month Rails "Pinteresting" App is finished! Woot!

Over the weekend, I didn't do much coding.  I did make it to the Railsgirl meetup and learned some stuff on JS (specifically Coffeescript) and Associations.

So far this current week, I've been busy working away at my Pinteresting app in One Month Rails.  I've done a ton in the past two days to get it finished!

• Utilized the jQuery Masonry gem so that images move around (with transitions) to fit the page width.  Oh... did I mention that since I built it with bootstrap, it will look great on tablets and mobile devices? ;-)
• Updated styling for displaying single pins on a page.
• Added Edit, Delete, and Back icon using bootstrap's Glyphicons.
• Changed up the root route so that all pins are displayed on homepage.
• Updated pins controller to change how the pins are ordered.
• Added pagination using will_paginate gem and limited number of pins displayed on a page to 8.
• Added user names and subsequent validations.
• Yay!

I started it less than 2 weeks ago and I can't believe that I've finished it.  I've learned a lot and can't wait to start the next RoR project (Hartl's Rails Tutorial)! Edit:  I've decided to do Daniel Kehoe's Learn Ruby on Rails first.  In that I will make a web app suitable for a small business, which will be great, since I want to do this for my dad's biz!  I want to redo my dad's business's website.  It's in terrible shape and needs help, and then I can also add it to my portfolio.

Of course, the Pinteresting app didn't always go smoothly and I used google and stack overflow to troubleshoot and fix problems.  My last issue was relating to a precompiling issue in my production environment.  After I finished the build today, I went back and jazzed up the css styling.  I added a background image to the jumbotron on the main page.  It was looking fine in development on my local host, but in production on heroku, it wasn't showing up and was giving a 404 not found error for the image.  I looked on stack overflow and found that others have had this issue too!  I followed some advice and it works now!

So freaking proud of myself!

Snazzy.

Progress update: 10.12.14... I am loving One Month Rails so far!

Things are going a little slow, but well!

I've been continuing with my One Month Rails project.  I really like it so far.  I have been working on adding Bootstrap elements and customizing the look of my app so far.

I added a NavBar and fixed up the layout and colors to look nicer.

Looking good!

And the big achievement today.... I got my app online with Heroku! It's live!  I have a few issues I need to fix/understand.  Heroku warned me to specify my Ruby version as best practices but there are 2 issues with doing this.  First, I have built the app using Ruby 2.1.4 but it says to specify 2.0.0 in the gemfile.  If I do this, it messes up RVM and ability to run rails server (doesn't show the rails gem at all).  I'm confused and I've reached out to the teachers at OMR for a little guidance.  In the meantime, I removed the ruby version specification so I don't have any issues running locally for now.  Updated:  I fixed it!  I needed to do a bundle install and I cleared it up and the gemfile is now specified for Ruby 2.1.4.  If in doubt, always bundle install. :-]

I also had an issue with my google font not working on Heroku, but a quick search on stackoverflow and I fixed that issue and pushed the update to heroku.

Also... I got the files setup on my computer for the next RailsGirls meetup on Sunday and took a look at the this Git/Github tutorial, although it is very similar to the one in the One Month Rails videos, so it was  review, but I'm getting more comfortable with using Git and use it often.

I couldn't stay away.... and I worked on it some more tonight and got the Devise gem installed and I am ready to start generating users to my site tomorrow!  Wheee!

I feel like today, I accomplished a lot.  :-]