Father. Husband. Problem Solver. Software Engineer.
Foreclosure I was a big fan of the first book in this series, “Ready Player One.” I read RP1 before it was a movie via the Audible service, in one week’s drive. Ernest captured lots of 80s cultural references in ways that were fun and unlike anything I had read to that point. The movie was equally fun for me, and I felt like it was true to the book. I was very excited and anticipated the second book in the series, “Ready Player Two.”
In my recent job search I have been getting turned down by a lot of employers because I do not have React or Angular experience. Today I decided to learn one and build a demo app that can prove that I know the framework and can get work done. After research and tallying up denial emails, I decided that React was looking more needed and that it was smarter to learn React. So, I set out to do it. I read a article that explain why React was superior to React and I was hooked. Mind you I finished this at 0200, when I should of been cozyed up against my wife, dogs, and my daughter in bed. However, now I have the damn learning fever that I get when I am learning something new.
Through my recent layoff and my currently ongoing job search, I have had to answer a lot of interview type questions. One of those questions was, “What else do you think we should know about you?”. I thought to myself, what else is pertinent here? Let’s be honest and write about my strengths and weaknesses. And then it set in… my brain came to a halt. What are my strengths? I have non, but I have a ton of weaknesses. Then steps in the wife. According to my wife my greatest strength as an engineer is my attention to detail, and my greatest weakness as a developer is my tendency to try and be a hero and take on too much work in an iteration. Let me go into some more detail.
Categories are not a Groovy specific thing. From a quick google search I found this Wikipedia article, which tells us that the idea of categories have been around in many languages such as Smalltalk (known as Class Extensions), C# 2.0 and Visual Basic 2005 (known as partial classes), Objective-C (known as categories), and I also found that Swift has the same idea known as Extensions.
When beginning a new feature task, it is good to take the time and sit back and think about your approach. Come up with your game plan. Your play book. You should start by asking yourself, “Where am I getting the data from?”. This is probably one of the most key decisions that you can make before you get started. Are you getting data from more than one source? Grab a scratch piece of paper, or a blank text editor and start writing down some notes. Next question you should ask yourself is, “Is there options Out Of The Box (OOTB)?”. Ask yourself, “Is there something in our ecosystem that I can use and just make it more robust? A class that I can just extend?”. Most of the time it appears that this is the case. Which really, ultimately seems to make development a lot easier. You do not have to start over from scratch. You can just extend a class, or use a category, and add the data or methods that you need for your new feature. Take a few minutes to look through your existing code base. Check some things out, pseudo code, write notes, draw a mind map, do whatever you can find that allows you to wrap your head around the entire feature and how you are going to implement it.
I follow the thoughtbot blog very closely, and today they posted about speeding up tests by selectively avoiding factory girl. This was enlightening on multiple levels.
So, if you are using a fork of my dotfiles you will see that I have a tmux and wemux config file in there. I generally use wemux to do work, don’t ask me why but it is what was suggested by a coworker over tmux (maybe a post will be due soon on that). I have been reading a lot on how to use tmux and have been having some problems. Thoughtbot has a whole trail on tmux and has a lot of great information on that trail.
So this morning I watched GoRails.com’s screencast ‘A Look Into Routing‘ and learned something fantastic about your routes file.
At work I have started to use Vim more often. In doing so I have adapted my coworker’s dotfiles repo (which is based off of thoughtbot’s dotfiles) and started using it for myself. I have forked it here. To install read the README.md or thoughtbot’s install blog post.
In attempting to complete thoughtbot’s Testing trail, I read Martin Fowlers’s article, “Mocks Aren’t Stubs”.
In attempting to complete thoughtbot’s Testing trail, I read Jared Carroll’s post, “Beginning Outside-In Rails Development with Cucumber and RSpec”.
This is my first post on my new platform. I will be sharing my findings on everything Ruby, Rails, HTML, CSS, JS, WordPress, Vim, and TDD. I will be reading a lot of things and learning things everyday and I will post them here in hopes that it will teach someone else as well.