Episode #57

For anyone that watched Seinfeld, it was always famous for being about "absolutely nothing"! I thought that was kind of convenient for this post, because I really do not have a specific topic to write about, but it's been awhile since I've written and I want to try to stay consistent. So I'll just write about a few random things...

First & foremost, hopefully everyone had a wonderful 4th of July weekend! Some of my brothers and sisters came in town to go camping out at Stone Mountain. Thankfully we had nice cool weather for July and it was a very enjoyable trip. Here are a few pics from the trip:

We hiked up Stone Mountain around dusk and I got this picture with the Atlanta skyline in the distant background

View of the water from near our campsite

  My nephew is definitely cooler than yours! This picture is from the Ride the Ducks trip at Stone Mountain and he was not liking the life vest.

Ok so on to a few things development related:

Coding is not like riding a bike

As much as I'm wanting to spend plenty of time working on my coding, I haven't had as much time to dedicate to it as I would like, especially this most recent week while I was out at Stone Mountain. One thing I've learned, if you aren't coding on a daily basis, you FORGET stuff! Things like "for" loops or "do while" loops, and "functions", etc. I learn how to do them, and then go back a week later and forget little tidbits of the syntax. Overall though, I am learning more every day and getting a lot faster on how to structure all of these coding fundamentals. I'm trying to bunker down and spend as much time as possible studying or practicing in one way or another.

Resources I'm using

I've been bouncing back and forth between a few resources lately, but the two most prominent are the work I'm doing on my Rails app, and then working through JavaScript tutorials on CodeAcademy. Overall Code Academy is a great resource for learning syntax; my biggest complaint is that I feel it breaks the problems down too much for you, and doesn't allow you to really push yourself on how to solve a complex problem. I am getting to a few parts in the tutorial where it offers some additional challenges to figure out on your own.

Status of my Rails App

I ran into a hiccup on my App. If you haven't been reading along, rather than doing the e-commerce app in the book, I'm trying to do an app where I can upload recipes I like and then pull them back up at random to help me decide what to make. I realized after the first main section that I was designing the wrong part of my app with their tutorial. I was designing the front end piece that you view the recipes from, whereas I was supposed to be designing the backend storage space where you can "Add, Edit, or Delete" new recipes and it also shows a view of all of the recipes (see snapshot below).

Once I realized the direction they were going, I changed up the CSS so the view would look like the picture above. It's not pretty yet, but a basic view for adding new recipes.

I think what I'm going to do now is dive into CodeAcademy to finish working through the JavaScript tutorial while reading ahead in the Rails book. Once I see how they plan to work through the e-commerce site, I think I'll have a slightly better idea on how to translate it to what I'm trying to do.


Well that's about it for tonight. Once again thanks for reading along!