In this series I’ve built out a Rails app from scratch, deployed it and I’m this close to getting it actually useful.
Will today be that final bit to hit “useful?” I don’t know as I write this, but it’s getting closer…
Last week we built out subscription buttons, profiles for managing subscriptions...
In this series I’ve built out a Rails app from scratch, deployed it and I’m not too far off from getting it actually useful.
I’ve also had a nice photo shoot with my stuffed animals so the site’s a lot prettier.
I want to build email reminders. It’s the last major thing for the site. Unfortunately...
I’m sure you’ve seen many articles asking, “is Rails dead?” and “is Ruby dead?”… Indeed, you’ll see them for any technology old enough to have a real userbase, even technologies that are still growing.
I’m not here today to answer whether Ruby or Rails is dead. Instead, I’m here to explain why people...
You can learn a lot about how much a man fears something by seeing what he will do to procrastinate instead of doing it. Paul Graham talks about “sneaking” out to get a root canal, feeling like he was getting away with it, to avoid a board meeting of his first startup.
I talked last time about how...
In this series I’m building courseware (teaching software) to let folks go through lessons in a better way than the simple email classes I use now. Last week we figured out how to track progress for a user in a topic using an AJAX call hooked up to a button and selector in the browser. It looks okay...
I talk about Coding Studies in a few places — my RubyConf talk and my book Mastering Software Technique,, for instance. But lots of “how-to” is never as powerful as just seeing something in action. So the video here shows me doing a simple coding study.
More About Coding Studies:
In this series I’m building courseware (teaching software) to let folks go through lessons in a better way than the simple email classes I use now.
It’s getting close to the point where random users could benefit from it. What’s it’s missing now are email reminders, being deployed (available to use...
I’ve been building a piece of Rails courseware, something to let people work through blog posts, videos and lessons I’ve written at their own speed. First I set up a simple Rails 6 app, then I prettied it up a bit.
Now it’s time to do something interesting with the actual lessons, which I’ve been...
Last time we talked about why I’m building course software in Rails from scratch, and built out a basic skeleton of database tables and a first trivial view.
Today, let’s add a theme, build out the view a little more and generally make it look better. I think “Let’s Build” series look better with...
Coding exercises seem like a great idea if you want to learn coding. If you want to learn a practical skill then you should practice, right?
And yet coders don’t do a lot of them. Some, but not a lot. And the longer you’ve been a coder, the fewer of them you seem to do. Ask your favourite long-term veteran coder. A few of them will act guilty that they don’t, but almost none of them actually do coding exercises.
Why don’t we?
I could rail about how silly that is. But I won’t. If nearly everybody doesn’t do something, it’s usually because it’s not as good an idea as it seems. They used to tell us to all use flowcharts for designing program logic. We didn’t. We were 100% right on that one.
We’re basically right about coding exercises, too. But there’s a better alternative that a few people do, especially long-time coders. That’s what you should actually be doing. It’s more fun, too.
But before we get to what you maybe should be doing, let’s talk about why you’re right about most coding exercises.
