my journey through learning ruby and other coding languages
MY FIRST CLI GEM
So this was my first attempt trying to code anything from scratch. It was quite the headache but the amount of understanding I gained through this experience rivals every lesson and lab I’ve read through all put together. I wouldn’t say I was completely lost going into this project but I wasn’t far from it. I chose to do the project on something that interested me to help ease the stress a little. I love football and the 2020 NFL draft is coming up in just a few weeks so i decided to use that as the basis for my gem. My wife and the majority of my close friends don’t follow the sport very much so I created the gem with them in mind. I wanted it to be something they could use to learn more about the players entering the draft. When I first started the project I watched a lot of project builds to try and get an idea how I would go about making my own. I spent a good bit of time just learning how to clone, add, commit, and push my repository to Github. Then an even greater amount of time setting up the environment for my gem. Thank goodness for the ‘bundle gem’ command, otherwise I can’t imagine what I would have done. After I finished the set up and made sure that I could run my code through my bin folder, I started stubbing out my cli using fake data. I created an array of some of the names I knew where going to be in the draft and a small summary line about each of them. I wanted my code to welcome the user, present them with a list of names and have them choose which player they wished to learn more about. Once they had done that, I wanted them to be shown a small summary about the player. When I finally got the CLI stubbed out with fake data and my code was working the way I intended it too, I created my ‘prospect class’. Here I created an object of a prospect that would be initialized with attributes of a name and a summary. I created a class variable of all and made it equal an empty array that I would eventually shovel my scraped data into. Finally I moved on to scraping. It was easily the most irritating part of this entire process. I think I changed websites 6 or 7 times during this process due to poor HTML structure or if that particular website used java script. Once I finally settled on a website. I was able to scrape the names of the players and then scrape a small summary of them which included their position, rank and a small summary of analysis about their skill level. Once I had the project working with real data I did some small refactoring to make my CLI work a little more efficiently. I created a loop so that the user could look at as many players as the wanted until they wished to exit and I added some spacing and color to make the text easier to read. I’m sure there are more ways for me to improve my code and I look forward to learning more in the review. Overall this experience has been incredibly beneficial to my level of understand and I hope it will benefit me in the labs and projects to come.
Another week come and gone and another opportunity has slipped through my fingers. It seems that In-Telecom decided that my experience level wasn’t what they were looking for. While I would love to wallow in self pity, I just have so much going on right now that not having to worry about switching jobs again…
A week removed from my in person interview with In-Telecom and I still haven’t heard back. I was informed that I would hear from them early this week at the latest so I’m hoping for tomorrow. I felt the interview went well and I’m hoping for an offer, but we will just have to wait…
Big break through this week! After weeks of countless rejection letters and applications that went unanswered, I have finally got another interview. I company located in Slidell called In-Telecom. They are a full service technology company providing customized solutions for cloud telephone, voice over IP, managed IT services, video conferencing, cyber security & data backup, physical…
I have been continuing my work on my new Match game application this week. to recap its a simple match game made with a React and Redux frontend and a Ruby on Rails backend. It is also Kingdom hearts themed. This week I was able to starting configuring some of the visuals of the frontend.…
Bouncing between a few different projects right now. Still steadily working on the official website for my podcast “Sorry We’re Late”. However, I’m also working on a new JavaScript Match game. I am a crazed Kingdom Hearts fan and with the 20th anniversary approaching next year I am attempting to make some KH themed fan…
A bigger development in the state of my job search happened this week. The search continues for my break into the Software field. However, we will be transitioning out of Dominos and into a more tech oriented line of work with Best Buys Geek Squad. I started my journey with Flatiron to get myself out…
Not a lot of time to dedicate to coding this week unfortunately. However we did put a little more work into our new website. The set up is complete, all of our dependencies are installed and the Mongo database is connected to the repository. At this point we are beginning actual work on the database.…
I’m beginning a new project his week. During my time in the Flatiron Curriculum I had started working on a website for a podcast that my friends and I do on a biweekly basis. For the initial project I just made a JavaScript Shopping Cart. I didn’t add any sort of storage or database management…
In my last two blog posts I’ve talked about the countdown clock that I was making to be able to use in OBS. It came to my attention that I needed to make some changes to it. The purpose of the countdown clock was to use in a stream and have it counting down the…
Last week we wrote about creating a countdown timer using JavaScript. Using only 3 files one for Html, Css and JavaScript we created a fully working countdown timer. We created a Div in the Html file that would take in a varying amount of time. Styled it to be centered and colored it white in…
Ryan's Coding Journey 