Update on Ruby and Rails learning experience

christine on June 28, 2018

Even though I may not be writing about it, I am continuing my deep-dive into the word of Ruby.  At work I am mostly focused on Rails.  My app is Rails, and the tickets I am working on are Rails (with some haml and scss thrown in, yay for learning some front-end development!).   Currently I have been able to be become semi-productive, but haven’t  been able to complete a ticket on my own, which is a humbling experience.  We are doing one week sprints, so I do try to muddle my way through on an assigned ticket.  But since time is short, you need to just women up and ask for help sooner then later.  When time allows, I am still working through a Rails Tutorial.

At night, I have still been working through Ruby the Hard Way and have made it up to exercise 15 or so.  These have been very easy so far, but I have a feeling that it will pick up speed soon and I don’t want to skip something that might be important. Got derailed this week because one of the lessons is working on accepting user input, and suggested looking up Zork, so the rest of my evening was playing that. It kinda reminds me of Vim, if you can remember the keywords it can be fun, but if not you are just kinda stuck in a dark room (terminal).

In other fun news, I actually have people visiting my website! Um thanks, I really didn’t know that anyone would read this, and with my handy dashboard on Flyweel I can see that I have visitors. Now what percentage of those are spam bots, who knows  ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Side note: if anyone knows why when I run my rails server I get “MiniProfiler storage failure: Connection lost (ECONNRESET)” every once in awhile, could they share, that would be awesome.  Everything starts up and runs, but I just see that pop up pretty often.

Finding out how little you know about Git

christine on June 18, 2018

I haven’t been a Git user for a long time, I have just been actively using it since January. That may not sound like a long time, but for a developer using a tool for over 5 months is almost as much as some projects take (if you are lucky) or as long as a contract is.  Since switching from Java to Ruby, and moving to a new company who knows much more about this, I have learned how unsophisticated we were using Git.

We were on GitLab, using it with bash in a modified GitHub flow with a master and develop branches, all features were branched off of the develop.  We did have merge commit messages, and had some CI/CD integration pulling in from a internet accessible GitLab to an internal GitLab.  The switch from Subversion was done fairly easily, with some reorganization needed to switch up some of the repo structure (we went for a one-to-one relationship with all project == new git repo, but that made waaaaaay too many repos).  So, I had been doing some Git, and now I have learned that I really don’t know how to do Git.

Did I know what a Git alias was? Nope. What about rebase, pushing with options, or forking a repo? Nope, nope and nope.

So I now I have a git alias (that I have to have pulled up in a notepad so I can remember all the commands) and have to be a lot more specific with my commit messages (they are a-ok for development but when you are ready for you pull request, squash those babies) and no more straight pull and pushing for me! I need to remember to rebase, rebase, rebase and for the love of all that is good don’t add in extraneous commit messages, make sure to amend. With all this changing of history I am doing, I am feeling like a time-traveler.

 

Music for learning

christine on June 12, 2018

So picture this, you are sitting down at your desk, loaded up your tutorial, terminal, editor and have muted all your slack channels, you are ready to go.  But now you have to figure out something to listen to so you can tune out everyone in your open office, but what should you load up?

For me, I need something with no lyrics.  I have a hard time concentrating and really being able to focus when I hear other words.  So sometimes browsing on Amazon for a new playlist can be frustrating. EDM really is hit or miss, things that you don’t thing should have vocals end up having them.  There needs to be a no-lyrics tag, some way to make focus playlists more searchable.  Right now my go-to is Tycho, really anything by him.  Although, today I was trying to listen to the Past is Prologue album but it kept on making me think that my streaming service was encountering some lag or other glitch, maybe this is just me? I also am a fan of Brian Eno, but sometimes you just want something more uptempo.

Any suggestions for good focus music?

Edit: Here’s a Spotify playlist I have started with some suggestions, and my favs.

Follow-up (7/24/18): I forgot to mention Bolling: Suite for Cello and Jazz Piano Trio and Deus Ex soundtracks. Both have been in rotation lately, along with my all time favorite 2112 by Rush, and the Spirited Away soundtrack by Joe Hisaishi.