This week was kicked off with a visit to Yammer. Their engineers spoke to us about their backgrounds, how they got into programming, and their day-to-day schedules. It was fantastic to learn that a large percentage of Yammer's engineers did not come from a traditional Computer Science background. The engineers that we spoke to really emphasized the importance of curiosity, patience, and perseverance when it comes to programming. They were really humble and confessed that even though they all had many years of experience in programming everyday is like a roller coaster - 50% of the time they felt like gods, but the other 50% of the time they felt like idiots.
When we finished the visit we headed back to the office to do some more work. We continued with Ruby on Rails. One of our projects was to create a gallery application that allows users to add artists and paintings to an online gallery. In addition to that, we had to write RSPEC testing, include user authentication , and style it with Bootstrap. This project required ~3 controllers and ~2 models.
Writing RSPEC testing proved to be difficult for me. At first, I was not keen on the idea of writing tests before writing my code because its cumbersome and time consuming. But the idea behind writing RSPEC is great because it make you write shorter and cleaner code. I, unfortunately, need to practice more on RSPEC.
User authentication was a long process as well. I don't really have much to say about it because I got the functionality to work, but it took my classmates and me a long time to get it.
Bootstrap was a fail for me. I was working on my code while my instructor was lecturing on Bootstrap. I caught up and was able to install the bootstrap gem in my Rails application, but there's just something about Bootstrap that's not satisfying. I felt like all I was doing was copying and pasting. With Bootstrap, I managed to change the look of my buttons and added padding and margin to the text, but I ended up styling the shit out of my application and made it media responsive with good-old-fashion CSS3. I love CSS3 - so much functionality. Below are some screen shots of my final product.
[gallery columns="4" ids="351,350,349,348"]
On Friday, we were told to commence with our first project. My project info to come in the next post! :)