Day 36

Diving deeper into Rails. There is a framework used by our client which is both fairly impressive, and quite complicated. It is powerful in that it handles mostly all of the needed CRUD for controllers, with a very polymorphic and expansive system, but it is also enormously complicated an difficult to understand. Diving into the code certainly helps, but it sacrifices clarity for density. None the less, seeing the bare bones for a new framework which, once understood, can drastically increase your productivity, is pretty cool. I wish I had been there to see its development from birth.

Working more with Micah today, we got a lot done on our current feature. I revamped my Cucumber knowledge, getting to write a few step definitions and acceptance tests recently. Cucumber reads quite naturally and is pretty easy to work with.

I also learned more about the REST convention, and following it conventions for URLs and routing. This, along with defining a separation between all the dynamic structure of a page (like the Java Script) and the actual html for the page. The client, in the spirit of being Restful (btw, Rails 3.0 is going to incorporate this by default), likes to keep a web page as pure html and thus have all the JS in header operations before the page's html is constructed. In this way, if a browser doesn't accept JS, it can still read the page, its just that requests that require JS wont do anything.

Got another 30 pages done with the Rails book as well. At this point, mostly everything learned is learned through example and practice, thus I am writing a lot of code while reading. Naturally, I am making the pet project that the book instructs you to make, but along side that I am going to work on my personal website so that I can really put what I learn into practice. It is very important that I design a Rails App from start to finish on my own so that I can develop a better understanding of the separation between the client's code and built in Rails features.

I find that it is far more important to understand what is going on, than to merely know what is going on. The first is far more challenging, but also much more powerful. It is just like highschool and college physics. You can memorize all the formulas and equations you want, but come test time if you don't understand the material, you can still get caught up by a tough word problem. Understanding gives you even more than this, since if you understand the fundamentals of a formula or a problem, then you can recreate the needed equations on the spot without having them memorized. The same is true with coding, algorithms, and syntax. You can memorize and know all you want, but until you understand what you are working with, you wont be able to design creative solutions.

Sorry for being brief, I have some Sociology hw to do, and I NEED sleep! Early morning trips to Chicago are taking their toll