I just wrote "Week 4" in the blog title...how is it already week 4? The days are flying by so fast! It's crazy to think after Friday is done, we will be a third of the way done with classes at The Iron Yard (TIY). This week focused more on our hospital project
So...I started this blog post on Tuesday (I think) and it's already Thursday night and then next thing I know...it's Sat now night!! These days are going by in a blur. This week we have worked on some more rails concepts. We have created join tables and polymorphic relationships. Join tables allow you to create many to many relationships. Polymorphs allow you link something like a comment to many different tables in a database.
Tuesday we got to learn about bootstrap. Bootstrap is a really amazing Open Source Software (OSS) tool which means anyone can use it for any reason for free. What it does is adds some really sweet CSS styling and allows for you to easily style your website. However, the coolest feature (in my opinion - and remember I've only used it for 2 days) is the fact that you are able to easily create grids to put information where you want on the screen. Anyone who has ever messed with HTML and CSS knows how much of a pain in the ass it can be to get things in just the right spot. Bootstrap greatly simplifies this painstaking process.
On Wednesday we got a slight reprieve from the firehose of information and learned some pretty cool shortcuts. The TA for the front end (Javascript, intensive HTML/CSS) taught all the students some really awesome things you can do in Sublime Text (our text editor of choice). One of the coolest features he showed was the ability to program your own hot keys. He had programmed in a hot key where when he typed in "rs", Sublime would automatically translate that to "<%=" (operator used in embedded Ruby). However, this operator ended up becoming obsolete this week since we switched from embedded Ruby to HAML. We also learned about Foundation which is another tool like bootstrap. I haven't actually gotten to play with it yet but it looks pretty sweet!
Thursday we were given a big new team project. We were assigned to groups of 3 and given the task to build a working site that looks good and incorporates CRUD (create, read, update and delete - databases). My team decided to create a Gym Management System consisting of CRUD for "trainers", "workout programs" and "members". Our goal is to link these different areas with Join tables and utilize user authentication for employees to edit these areas. Another piece of the project is for us to fork a repo, make changes and then push requests. Well, the first submit caused a merge conflict. A merge conflict occurs when 2 persons (or more) have edited the same lines in a file. The version control software (git) doesn't understand where to make the change when the files are merged together and just stops. It's a major pain to merge the files back together (not because it's hard but because I'm new to this); however, after about 45 minutes the team was able to figure out the fix. I have to admit it was more Brute Force in getting the merge to work than it was in actually figuring out how to do it. I hope to have a few more merge conflicts so I can figure out exactly what we did to fix it.
One other cool item we learned about this week was devise. Devise is a gem (ruby code someone wrote that makes things really easy) that makes user authentication really easy. I hope to spend some more time working with it since it's so powerful. All you have to do is install the gem and you can create users, start login sessions, close login sessions and even enforce authentication with a few simple lines of code. Cool stuff!
All in all this week was another great week at TIY. I can't believe how much I have learned in the past few weeks! It's awesome! If you're interested in checking out my code, check out my GitHub repo: graymd. In the meantime, I am excited to have a low country boil with some friends tomorrow- while I love football, I may love food more than either team playing in the Super Bowl tomorrow! Until next time...see ya!
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