Having space and time to build stuff again
Now that I’ve had the space and time to build my speakers, I realize I’ve managed to neglect one of my favorite things to do when younger: play with tools and build stuff.
Brainstorming a list of Rails Quiz Questions for a Junior RoR Developer
Which files are created by the rails plugin new foo generator (assuming you haven’t patched the generator), and what do they do? README.rdoc – Where you put documentation Rakefile – Creates standard rake tasks for the gem. rdoc, and test. foo.gemspec – Standard gemspec doc to load in lib/foo, the version file, declares Spec data … Read more
Phish in Tahoe
A friend took me to see Phish in Tahoe. It was different from other shows I’ve been to in the capacity that people were there to see just this one band play, and some of those people had been to over a hundred shows. The impression I got from the show was that the band … Read more
Nostalgia on Aging
As I see Facebook newsfeed-featured photos of once upon a time classmates and teenaged friends growing older, I get nostalgic for days when it seemed everyone my age was full of curiosity and health. Is it purely a game of genetic chance? No, there is sufficient evidence to give me hope that with the right … Read more
Running as a Form of Commuting
I used to run to school every day when I was in high school. I grew up in a neighborhood called Norwood. Norwood was literally two elevated train tracks over from the school I went to, Horace Mann, which was in Riverdale. Approximately two miles away. My first year at Horace Mann, when I was … Read more
Interesting article about getting rid of nested attributes
http://matthewrobertson.org/blog/2012/09/20/decoupling-rails-forms-from-the-database/ Still figuring out how I feel about this…
Rails snippet: Storing ENV keys in config
These are pretty much the exact steps from Paul Elliot’s blog post on the subject. In case you found this post from google, his blog post is a better source for this sort of information than mine, so please look at his post. I’m just repeating the steps here because I keep looking it up … Read more
I’m in love with Angular.js. There, I said it.
Angular.js, how I love thee. Let me count the ways: For how you let me truly separate consumers of an api from the api itself. For how you implement bidirectional binding and make ajax calls easily. The entire time I’ve been writing rails code, I’ve felt it’s been messy having the view logic able to … Read more
Code Snippet for getting a certain field from a scoped model
This comes up a lot and I keep reinventing it: @user.cars.map(&:name) Note that pluck doesn’t work because it’s a class method not an instance method.
Why it’s hard to learn from books – But you can do it!
I’ve been coaching my younger sister through learning to computer program. As part of the process I’ve been sending her pep/ motivational emails that might be useful to anyone who’s going through the list of books I recommended in this post here. Here’s one of them encouraging her to push through the difficulty of learning … Read more
Consulting Company Progress – Year in Review
It’s been over a year since I formally incorporated my consulting company and I have had a lot of lessons and learning experiences. First, I’ve learned that owning a consulting company is a much different experience from working at one and helping it grow. When you’re an owner you notice and focus on different things … Read more
“I want to learn to code. Can you help me?”
I’ve been answering this question a lot these days. Possibly because whenever someone technical asks me to help them with their web-based startup, I send them this blog post http://www.humbledmba.com/please-please-please-stop-asking-how-to-find on how to find a technical cofounder. (This is an improvement on the alternative, which is to offer to try to help and then straining the relationship … Read more
Decluttering with Craigslist
Visiting my mom’s house, I saw quite a bit of space was taken up by books that no one in our household was planning to be read again. So I scheduled a time for my mother, sisters and I to get together and go through them all. We put all the books we were definitely … Read more
New Rails Project breedmapper.com
Working on a new website, breedmapper.com. It’s an app to help people select dog breeds. Basically, I was trying to find dog breeds that might be good for me (never owned a dog before) and found it really difficult to research different breeds, filter, etc. So I’m making an app for it to help myself … Read more
Scraping tools
selectorgadget nokogiri