03 Apr 2015
It can be frustrating when things just don’t work. It’s like a
viscious cycle, where your thinking keeps going downhill. Generally I
attribute it to programming too fast. You end up skipping steps and it
punishes you eventually.
The remedy: slow down or take a break.
When my brain feels fried, I like to step back and review the basics.
I think it helps to take a break from the low-level detail. Doing so
also gives you a confidence booster when you know you can at least comprehend the
high-level stuff.
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15 Feb 2015
Just thought I’d share a cool little gem I came across recently. As
mentioned in the README, it was inspired by Bret Victor’s thought-provoking talk Inventing on Principle .
The Principle:
Creators need an immediate connection to what they create.
Seeing is believing acts like a multi-line, editor-based REPL (Read Evaluate Print Loop).
For ruby, think IRB.
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05 Feb 2015
Small challenge: Reverse a string in ruby without using the standard
library #reverse method.
There were some interesting comparisons on stackoverflow . I decided to write my own solution and run some benchmarks with ruby 2.2.0.
My reverse function turned out similiar to one of the stackoverflow solutions,
which used Enumerable#reduce method combined with #unshifting
(enqueue) characters into a new array.
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21 Jan 2015
Well I finally experimented with haml. Surprisingly, it felt
relatively easy transitioning from html files (embedded with erb) to haml
files.
As the documentation suggests:
Give yourself 5 minutes to read the tutorial and then convert one of
your ERB templates to Haml. Simplify. Enjoy. Laugh. 20 minutes later,
you will never go back.
So that’s exactly what I did with my guitar forum website. Here’s one of the
views displaying list of guitars before and after using haml (note I did some additional refactoring which I’ll explain below):
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12 Jan 2015
For the past year, I’ve coded using sublime text 3 (ST3). It’s a great text editor, especially when you’re getting started. I’ve gotten so comfortable writing code in ST3, that it was hard to even think about switching text editors.
I kept hearing about IDEs and other text editors such as emacs and vim.
It appeared that a large proportion of Rails developers were using vim.
I was curious as to why. After getting comfortable with Ruby and working my way
through a few Rails projects, I decided it was time to experiment with
vim to see if it was the right fit for me.
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