Week's Updates....

Still working through Practicing Rails book...  I got side-tracked doing the basic Rubyonrails.org Getting Started Simple Blog tutorial.

I also found a Udemy course on creating a Craigslist clone using RoR that I blasted through and completed in 2 days, over NYE and New Year's day!  It didn't use any scaffolding and involved doing different things than I have in other tutorials - populating db using seeds.rb, geocode gem, creating a search function using JS, 4 models interacting with one another, etc.  It was a good tutorial and helped take some of the automagic mystery away from RoR.  I appreciated that it didn't rely on scaffolding to build out folders and files in the MVC, I feel like my understanding is getting better and better.  I think I'm going to be in good shape when I tackle Hartl's Rails tutorial soon.

My husband is going through One Month Rails before my subscription ends.  Adding RoR to his programming background is a good thing and will allow us to pair program and work on a project together.  I hope.  It's sometimes hard for me to expect him to want to learn/do more programming when he has been programming in another language/enviro all day, every day for work.

Week's Progress

I started reading Practicing Rails by Justin Weiss.  Kinda pricey ebook and I'm not convinced it was worth the price so far.

I started working on (and deployed to Heroku) a site for a small machining business.  This is my first solo project I've done without following a tutorial (even though I used my past tutorials as references).

The big features of this project are:

1. Creation of a contact form that emails site owner directly when a visitor sends a contact request.  No database- it is similar to the app I built during the Learn Rails tutorial.  The contact form uses ActiveModel class.
2. Utilized Bootstrap theme template for the design.  This was the first time I've tried to adapt and customize a pre-designed template for a Rails project.  Definitely had its frustrating moments!

Of course, during the process, there were little issues that came up and required troubleshooting, but I got it all fixed and working!

What I learned during this process was that I need to work on planning work and creating sketches of the pages I'm making so I keep myself limited to one task at a time and not spread out and skipping around from task to task.    This mainly happened when I added the bootstrap features and started adding the div classes to each individual view for the bootstrap template design.

Oh, and my github streak is up to 13 days!   My understanding is better of Rails framework.  Thinking of how things go together in MVC is going better for me.  I'm pleased with that.

Goals for next week:

• I'm going to keep reading Practicing Rails.  Try to finish this week.
• Work on a personal website for myself.

Goals for January:

• Hartl's Rail Tutorial!
• Read Easy ActiveRecord for Rails Developers

Tuesday's Progress

I finished Kehoe's Learn Rails Tutorial.  I was able to do the whole thing easily while my spouse was away on a trip.  He's back tomorrow, so I will probably be taking some time off during the holidays to relax, bike, and snowboard. :-)  I have a 9-day streak on GitHub.  woot!

I am happy with my progress so far this month.

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.

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.

Thurs and Friday progress.

Not too much progress, I did some more work in Kehoe's Learn Rails tutorial, but not as much as I hoped for.  I learned more about the conventions in Rails, using Foundations CSS styling (not sure I like it more than Bootstrap, but we'll see as I do more with it), and a little review of basic ruby.  I guess I was hoping to be done with it in 2-3 days.  Only excuse I have is that I've been sick.

I'm hoping to feel better over the weekend, get more work done, and extend my 5 day streak of commits on github :)

I also did the git/brew upgrade to fix the security issue with git.  I swear, I can never have a simple upgrade/install on my machine with the command line.  It always requires going to stack overflow to find solutions to my problem.  I also feel like I try one solution, doesn't work.  so I keep going and randomly trying more and more advice.  I wish I understood what I am doing more on there.  I got Git to update finally, only for my terminal to say the old version # when I checked it.  but if I went to upgrade, it said the new version of git was already installed, wtf?  Luckily with a close/reopen of the terminal window, it was only showing the most recent version install and everything seems to be peachy now.  whew.

I've been feeling like I have no idea what I'm doing the past couple days.  Self-doubt.  Hopefully I'll perk up when I start to feel better.  I don't feel like I've been able to think clearly at all and my learning is stunted.

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!