Fun with Ruby...and a Little Bit of Python

I'm still building stuff in Ruby. I think the more that I learn, the more interested I am in programming. I'm making progress on the STE(A)M Truck app and now I also have other people to help me, since I presented it at Code for Atlanta on Tuesday night. I'm the only back-end developer, which works well for me, because once I get it finished, hopefully by this weekend, I can learn from the UX and front-end developers.

The only issue that I'm running into on the STE(A)M Truck app is that my latest commits didn't get added to the heroku app. For some reason, the branch that I created for that session of coding also disappeared, also. I tried a couple of things, like re-pushing it to both github and heroku, but nothing worked, so I'm just hoping that when I push the latest commits the problem will resolve itself.

I started looking at django tutorials, as well, this week. Right now, and I have only just barely gotten past the installation instructions; I am the opposite of impressed. Hopefully, that will change, but I definitely want to learn it, or at least get a decent amount of experience with it, just in case I need to use it for...developing stuff.

This is a funny video from How to Basic 

on youtube.com

On the career front, I applied for a fellowship with Code for America and I completed step 2 of the process on Monday. I'm really hoping to get this so that I can move to San Francisco for a year to just work on coding and civic hacking. This would be perfect for me not only because I would love the experience, but if I get the fellowship, when it ends, I will have exactly 2 years of commits on github and the necessary prerequisites for a job in coding and web development. It would also allow me to just work on my coding, by working on personal and freelance projects, and go to the gym until it actually starts in January.  I took this year off from the gym to learn coding and I'm really looking forward to getting back in there in August.

UPDATE: The problem I was having heroku with the app has resolved itself. I did, however manage to break it again and spent a few hours resolving that issue, but it is working.

Building Stuff.

I just finished the Ruby on Rails Tutorial for the second time. This time was more fun, because I wasn't in such a rush to get through it. The first time, I wanted to see everything that I could do and complete the project. This time I was willing to go a little slower and change some things up. Although, I did feel myself trying to rush some parts so I could get through it.

My next step is to read the tutorial, again. I felt like I learned twice as much going through the tutorial the second time as I did the first, but I still feel like I have a lot to learn. I am going to use this next run through the tutorial to create my first real project using the base program that I made in the second run. This time through I made a few slight modifications, like using first_name & last_name, instead of putting it in one field. I also left out the gravatar image part, so the I can allow the users to upload their own photos going through it this time. I plan to complete all of the additional exercises this time, as well as change the user experience of the app, taking time to get a better grasp on CSS & html. Well, the html isn't to difficult, there are just some things that I hadn't seen before I did this tutorial and I want to have a better knowledge of what's available. I would like to work on my JavaScript as well, but I may save that until after I finish this trip through.

I have a couple of ideas as to what I want to make this app into, so I'm struggling slightly with the direction that I want to take it in. I do know, however, that I want to add a user_name and allow the users to upload their own profile pics. The other features that I will add will depend on the exact direction that I take the project, but I'm pretty excited.

I feel like I'm finally at a point where I know enough that I can kind of relax and take my time building things. I'm still going to keep coding every day, but I'm past the introduction stage and making my way into a more intermediate level of coding and developing. Even though I was told when I started that the best way to learn would be to actually start building stuff, I'm the type of person who needs to see the whole picture and what's available first, before I start going off on my own.

I also have a couple of side projects that I'm going to work on this time through, as well. I'm going to work on  STE(A)M Truck project and probably design my own blog app, which shouldn't be too complicated. I've already started on both, but I'll probably just restart the STE(A)M from scratch. This will let me practice on other projects while I think through exactly what I want to do with the one I'm working on now.

hmmm...

I haven't been blogging much lately, mostly because I'm doing the Rails Tutorial, again, for the second time. At this point I'm just trying to get good and get a firm grasp on everything in Rails. I'm about half way through Chapter 9, now. Everything just seems like nothing to really blog about at this point. There's nothing new to me anymore. The mistakes that  I'm making, I'm solving and correcting pretty quickly, and more than anything, I'm trying to internalize how everything works.

I'm building my own app this time, so I'm changing some stuff up as I go, which is really forcing me to understand what I'm doing. When I finish, I plan to go back through again to really customize my app. For instance, instead of using gravatar for profile pictures, I want to use CarrierWave, so that my users won't have to sign up for a different site to have a profile pic.

As much as I'm enjoying Rails and learning the backend, though, I'm really looking forward to customizing the CSS on this and adding my own look and feel to this app. I probably should take some time and just do some brainstorming on this and taking notes.

National Day of Civic Hacking [post-event report]

This weekend I participated in the National Day of Civic Hacking at the the Atlanta Community Food Bank. The event started on Friday at 6PM and was catered by Chik-Fil-A. The first night they also had veggie wraps, but for breakfast and lunch, on Saturday, I had to work around the chicken based diet. It turned out to be a little bit too much for one of my vegetarian friends: those delicious chicken nuggets. R.I.P. vegetarian diet. This is the second week in a row that I've had my vegetarianism tested.

I had tossed a few ideas around in my head, but most of them involved being in D.C., so by the time that I got there, I was just really looking for a project to join that would allow me to work on my ruby and/or python skills. When we got there, the food bank already had about nine specific issues that they wanted to have addressed and 3 other people pitched ideas of their own. I ultimately joined a group that was addressing the need of the smaller agencies of the food bank to have a presence online. Best. Decision. Ever.

When I joined my team the first person that I met was Josh, a designer. Josh worked with the Mathew to get the overall design together and he was attending the event with his business partner, Morgan. When I met Josh the first thing I said was "this needs to be a ruby project." Luckily, that was what they worked with, so I was on board with the project at that point. [I had considered working on another project first, but I didn't for reasons that I won't go into.] Morgan was the backend developer for th business that he and Josh were partners in: Polar Notion. Morgan had wayyyyy more experience than I did and I had got an amazing opportunity to learn from him and gawk at how fast he could get stuff done. The other members of my team were Greg, Cashif, Vivianne, Mathew, Ben, and Jeff. Jeff was apparent excellent with mapping technologies, but unfortunately he didn't show up for the second day, so we didn't have a chance to leverage those particular skills.

Once we had the basic idea down, we split up into three groups: designers,

 a think tank, and developers. Morgan, Greg, and I were the development 

end of the operation, with Morgan acting as the team lead.

Morgan easily did over 90% of the coding, and that's probably understating it. seriously. He was getting things done really fast, helping me with my code, and contributing to the overall project at the same time. Morgan, also knew a lot about gems and API's and had lots of great advice. He's one of the coolest people I've ever met and just meeting him alone was an awesome part of my experience. However, my entire group was awesome, as well as the people attending overall.

What we decided to build was something that I called "foogler", even though that name is under dispute, because several people in the group wanted to call it "foogle." The biggest mistake people make in marketing is putting marketing decisions to a vote among non-creatives, imo. I'm pretty sure I was the only one on our team with a background in marketing, but that's the thing about marketing: everyone thinks that they can do it. :)

Anyway, what we made was basically a search engine to be attached to the food bank's website, that allowed smaller agencies to make a "profile"that was searchable by clients using zip codes. Other than my disagreement with the name, I feel like my team worked together extremely well. Everyone did their parts and pretty much everyone involved with the event was impressed with our team performance.

This is "foogler"

When the judging started, I was pretty confident that we were going to win, but then a team that did a SMS based application that allows people looking for food banks to connect with food bank agents through text messaging. This was really good idea, and I think that something like that would be ideal for places like Africa, where people use SMS for many commercial activities, already. I had seen this TED talk, so I immediately understood the impact that something like this could have. My only concern about that project was whether or not it had already been done in Africa by someone else. 

When the judges had finally made a decision the results were as follows:

• Fourth Place: Originally, there were only supposed to be three winning groups, but one team took on the inglorious task of patching up a few bugs in the SQL database system and they were properly rewarded with the "Honorable Mention" award. [I'm so glad that these guys didn't get overlooked. Their work went into effect right then and will have an immediate impact.]

• Third Place: Went to a group that did an Internet of Things project that was pitched by Concrete Jungle that involved placing sensors on fruit trees to determine when the fruit was ready to be picked based on bending of the branches. This would have been a fun project to work on had they had python developers and implemented Raspberry Pi. The reason that I didn't consider this one is because of their lack of coders and my lack of experience. This was definitely an interesting project, but it may have been a little bit much to take on for a project that had less than a 24 hour turnaround.

• Second Place: Rightfully went to the SMS group.

• First Place:  Team Foogler!!!!

front row(from left to right): me, Vivianne, Morgan

back row: Greg, Cashif, Josh, Ben

not pictured: Mathew and Jeff

The whole team got these sweet $50 gift cards:

After everything was said and done, we had an extra card. We're going to use that when we get together on Wednesday for drinks! I can't say enough about my experience and I'm going to stop now, but if you have a chance, you should definitely participate in the National Day of Civic Hacking next year and get involved with Code for America...I had a great time. Learning, using what I've learned to give back, and meeting new people was awesome; winning gift cards was just icing on the cake. 

Monday Morning Update #2

...strong week.

I've been working on the Ruby on Rails Tutorial and my coursera classes. I have to say, this tutorial is much better than the lynda tutorial. I would definitely recommend never, ever doing that tutorial, for any reason.

Using this tutorial, I have learned how to properly use git and github. I got jammed up for a minute there, I didn't realize that I needed to create the repository at the website before I could push things to it, but luckily the Web Applications Architecture Class on coursera really came through for me this week, in that regard. My github is starting to look respectable. I knew that it was a good idea to take that course along side my independent work with Ruby on Rails. The only issues that I have with this tutorial involves one of the gems: execjs. For some reason, I'm getting and error for this gem on everything that I work on. This is how you fix it:

Run gem install --version '1.2.4' execjs

Add gem 'execjs', '1.2.4' anywhere in your Gemfile.

Run bundle install

Start your server with rails s and your problem should be solved.

Part of the reason that I'm putting this here is for future reference. ;) 

 I wish that I understood exactly what is going wrong with this gem, so that I could fix it and not have to do this with every app, but se la vie, I guess.

Speaking of the Web Applications Architecture Class, it is still kind of annoying me. The assignments are pretty basic and the class moves way to slow for me to use it as a stand alone instructional for ruby on rails...maybe if I worked ahead, though. He is posting the work 2 weeks ahead though. I just really don't like the class enough to spend extra time each week working on that when I have other resources. I wouldn't go as far as to say that you shouldn't take the class, if you're trying to learn, though. To each his own.

The other class,  An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, is going great! This week, our project was to recreate the game "Rock, Paper, Scissors, Lizard, Spock" that was featured on Big Bang Theory. Me being me, I have to watch the first episode of the show; I had been avoiding it, but I'm willing to give anything a chance, especially since, apparently, the professors [there are 5] think that that show is the bees knees [I just said that]. I hate that show. Hate is a strong word. What I did do was go to their facebook page, see which of my "friends" like that show and proceeded to judge them for it [...not out loud or in text, of course :)]. Anyway, the game was pretty simple and not overly challenging. It's nice to have this class a strictly a programming exercise, while studying so my web development.

I'm not married to the idea of making websites. My goal is to build useful for tools and entertainment applications. Don't get me wrong, I love the internet and I definitely look forward to being hands on in the deployment and management of my ideas, but just building websites in itself just doesn't do it for me. The underlying idea behind the website is where it's at.

Monday Morning Update #1

The first week of my programming courses on Coursera was mixed. I like the Python class, but I'm really skeptical about the Web Application Architecture Class. It's taught at the University of New Mexico, and it has a community college feel to it. The videos are just good enough to not be funny and the professor doesn't seem very interesting at this point...but we'll see how it goes.

The Python class, on the other hand, seems like it's going to be awesome. It's taught at Rice and our projects are making games...so that's going to be plenty awesome. The final project is an Asteroids clone. There are five professors that teach the class, I get the impression that most people who work with Python are pretty fun and have a sense of humor.  Exhibit A: the history of the name "Python." The teachers are not that funny, but they're trying, and keeping the class interesting. Neither of the classes are that demanding, yet. I did the first week's work for both classes on Monday.

On the Rails front, I had to dump the lynda tutorial. For starters, the guy teaching it was moving at 900 mph; that I could tolerate, but the straw that broke the camel's back on that tutorial was the fact that he kept changing things in the application that he wasn't recording or explaining and I got tired of having to do detective work to keep up with the lessons.

I have since moved on to this tutorial, which is awesome...so far. A part of me wishes that I had just gone ahead and done this tutorial, first, but I may be discounting how much what I learned doing the lynda tutorial puts me ahead of the game in this one. This new tutorial is more like a guide on a journey to learning to develop. Today, I got git all set up on my system and that was pretty cool. So in short, I've done another Ruby tutorial and I've been reading another book...one about git...along with the web design book that I started last week. So...right now, I'm still in the setting everything up phase.

...peep it:

So now, I'm also working on my unix skills, as well. I am having fun, though. I really wouldn't want to be doing anything else with my time, right now. I'm looking forward to this weeks classes, and the next chapters and lessons in my books and tutorials.  

In my spare time, I'm working on my Spanish and Hindi for 30 minutes a day each and taking Buddhism and Modern Psychology. Also, every week, or so, I take a day or two off and do absolutely nothing, but watch TV and maybe have a few beers. The bad/awesome news is my sleep schedule is completely flipped. I go to sleep between 7:00AM and noon everyday. 

Oh Snap!

I almost forgot to blog, this week! :)

I've been doing a lot of work with Ruby on Rails, this week. I've gotten a basic understanding of how everything works now, and I'm about half-way through the lynda tutorial. I'm finally at the part where we're actually designing stuff for the website that we're building. It's cool because I'm learning all about servers and databases and how to use them to run websites. I'm getting used to dealing with all of the files and the way things are done and really starting to enjoy it... looking forward to building my own site from scratch...in probably a few more months.

In other news, I'm starting two new classes at Coursera, tomorrow. The first one, is called Web Application Architectures, and it teaches web development using Ruby on Rails. I'm really looking forward to this course, because while the lynda tutorial is getting me there, this class will give me a more current and interactive experience in Rails, and I can ask questions and talk to other students in the class that are at or around the same level, as I am, in web development. I think that this class is going to be good for the learning process that I have going.

The other course that I'm taking is called An Introduction to Interactive Programming in Python, which is pretty self explanatory. It's part of a 3 course track that will take me through the Summer and allow me to work on my Python skills while I'm doing my Ruby stuff.

I definitely wouldn't be doing both, right now, if I hadn't already gotten a decent amount of experience with both languages already. But on the plus side, the languages are pretty similar, and even the course syllabus for the first class says that what we learn on RoR is transferable to other platforms like Django for Python.

Two more things, I started reading this book, to get an comprehensive rundown on web design, and because in working in RoR I learned pretty quickly that I need to refresh and expand my HTML and CSS knowledge. Once I get the programming/scripting side down, I'm definitely going to have to take some time to focus on the visual design and user experience aspect of web development, not so much to get a job, but for when I start working on my own projects. I can't wait until I'm comfortable enough with what's on my plate, now, to get into that. This new book is easy to read and I should be finished with it by next weekend.

Another development, last week, was that I got a call about a job programming in Ruby. I did a phone interview that went well; the recruiter told me that he would be forwarding my resume along to the next step in the process. It would be awesome if that turned into a job where I could hone my skills in the near future, but I'll be okay, either way. ;)