John Moon

The past week I have taken a deep dive in the big boys tool club, TDD with capybara and rspec. This post isn’t to discuss about tools for TDD, but the WHY companies and individuals should write test for their code.

I want to start of with the negatives of TDD.

1. Testing takes time, and maybe the deadlines approaching. We hear it all the time. We don’t have time to test, because we need to hit the deadline. It will slow us down… WRONG. It will take you far more time and brain power to debug or make changes to your code with no tests. More on the later
2. Testing isn’t perfect, and sometimes we can waste of lot of time writing tests.
3. We can probably double our code output if we didn’t have to write any test

Thats all I could think of for reasons not to write test. If I must say, those are some terrible reasons not to write tests.

Why you should test

1. Testing helps us confidently modify our existing code. Why? Because as soon as we break something, our test SHOULD fail too
2. It’s faster! Some of you are probably thinking, “you just said testing takes time and you would double your code output if you didn’t write test. LIES.” Well it’s true that we may be able to spin out code faster, but in the long run, we would most likely lose. If we had to debug our app that has no test, but is twice as large. How long do you think it would take to debug such an application. On top of that the headaches, the tears, and depression is simply not worth it
3. It pushes us for better design. By this I mean that writing tests helps us see options when it comes to implementation. While we think and decide what we want to test, and how we want to test it. This additional time we’re spending on our application design helps us to pick better options. I’m not saying it’ll be the perfect design and you won’t have to touch it. But I believe it will be far better off, than if you went straight into implementation
4. We spend less time implementing new features to our existing code base. This going back to point number 1, of being confident of modifying our code because of the test.
5. We can’t afford not to test. Not writing test is expensive. It would cost the business more, in the long run because of the time we have to put in to debug. This slows production, and ultimately costs us more.
6. It’s a chepaer alternative

I think testing is important for all these reasons. I can’t imagine a company who don’t test their application. That shows me they don’t care what the code looks like as long as it ‘works.’ What rubbish and shotty job.

I would love to work at a company that respects their clients and their employees time to implement testing in all levels (acceptance and unit testing).

Want to talk? Shoot me a tweet @jmoon90

John

In the past week at Launch Academy we dived into object oriented programming. Here is a definition by tutorialspoint.

Ruby is pure object-oriented language and everything appears to Ruby as an object. Every value in Ruby is an object, even the most primitive things: strings, numbers and even true and false. Even a class itself is an object that is an instance of the Class class.

My definition is classes are there to help organize and structure the program so that it may be easily consumed by others. Todays post is about POODR that adds on top of my definition. It is a way to organize and structure program so that it may be easily consumed AND changed as new features are added.

I love that! As programmers, not only should we be thinking to making a working app, but also an app that has low replacement cost in the future. The idea is to write code that is SOLID (Single responsibility, Open-closed, Liskov substitution, Interface segregation, and Dependancy Inversion). I’m currently focusing on the single responsibility section of the SOLID. I find it difficult as a programming beginner to write classes that are loosely coupled as I want them to be. I started with classes that were family and knew everything about each other. However, with some easy to implement tricks and tips from the book I am learning to write more loosely coupled programs.

For instance, I wrote a program about a company with many employees, who wanted to know if their employee owed taxes or was due a refund. My first instinct was to create a company class and an employee class. I was having difficulty of instantiating a single employee. The problem was that I was iterating and saving the employees into a single hash, then passing the hash to the employee class. This caused 2 problems. First all my employees were a single instance. Second, because they are a single instance when I passed in the instance to the Employee class, the employee class was not reading in 1 employee at a time, but the whole slob.

class Company

def load_data(file)

employees = [] CSV.foreach(file, :headers => true) do |row|

employee = row.to_hash

employees << employee

end

employees

end

end

Employee.new(employees)

For an experienced developer the solution was right in front of them. The fix was quite simple. I just needed to change where I was instantiating the object. The previous code changed to the following.

class Company

self.load_data(file)

employees = [] CSV.foreach(file, :headers => true) do |row|

employee = Employee.new(row.to_hash)

employees << employee

end

employees

end

This instantiates each employee separately as I pull data from the CSV file. Now when I pass my employee to the Employee class, it will be of 1 instance of an employee. The benefit is that I won’t have to do an iterator in my employee class but instead I can iterate inside my company class.

Another trick I found very useful was passing in hashes as arguments instead of a multiple variables. The benefits are that you don’t have to worry about in what order you pass in the arguments. If you don’t pass in a value for a specific instance, you can simply give it a default value.

class Employee

def initialize(arguments)

@employee = arguments[‘employee’] || ‘missing name’ @tax_owed = arguments[‘tax_owed’] || ‘0’ @tax_paid = arguments[‘tax_paid’] || ‘0’

end

end

Hope you learned something from that. If you have any cool tricks feel free to share in the comments.

Happy coding!

John

Going through 2 weeks of bootcamp I can’t iterate enough how important iterations and loops are. It is one skill I believe has helped me problem solve above average. On that note, I would like to teach looping through arrays like I am talking to my former non-techie self.

What is iterations? It is the idea of running a same action to each object of the group.

num_array = [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]

num_array.each |num| puts num * 2 end

The result is a follows

2

4

6

8

10

returns nil

Lets break that down. What happened? I have a array called num_array that contains the numbers 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5. I ran the each method to the array.

I chose to use the each method because I think it is one of the most commonly used iterators and one that as a developer should know. The each method is basically pulling out each individual number 1 at a time and displaying the result of the number multiplied by 2.

The results are not stored because I used puts. The returned value is nil in this case.

Notable iteration methods

map, each, each_with_index, inject, and select

This of course is not the full list of iteration methods, but one’s that I find myself using frequently. If you have any questions feel free to contact me @johnmoon6. Follow me on Github – jmoon90.

If you want to read more about iterations I recommend you check Alan Skorkin’s out.

StudyTogether is a website where those who want to study with other people can come and join or create a study group. I tried learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails alone. I tried tutorials. I tried books. It was difficult, and I didn’t gain much from it. The problem with self-studying and online studying is that there are endless sources of information, but no one to talk with.

My breakable toy will create study buddies. Other people who are going through the same studying material will be able to talk out problems, teach each other, and learn from the group members mistake. I am going to create a space for users to collaborate on their learning. Something like Khan academy.

Through my experience at Launch Academy, this idea is becoming more and more relevant. I noticed how my learning curb has spiked and is acclerating as I am surrounding with people who are passionate and wanting to learn Ruby on Rails. I will try to incorporate aspects of what I believe to work well in learning in a group environment.

Code On.

During my first week at Launch Acadmey I built a simple ruby script so that I don’t have to leave my keyboard to ask a question through google. I call it NoMouse.

The idea came when Johnny, one of my mentors at LaunchAcademy, taught me that everything we do in our GUI can be done through the terminal. This was a very interesting and cool concept as a beginner. I wanted to test this theory out. I wanted to see if I can open up my browser from the terminal and open a specific page.

Here is how I tackled the theory. I needed to first figure out how to open a browser or website through my terminal.

open “http://www.google.com”

This was possible. Now I need to know if I can run a script and open a browser. In my terminal I ran ruby browser.rb and it would run the following script.

system(“open”, “http://www.google.com”)

This opened up possibilities for me. I was becoming greedy! Not only could I open a browser I wanted to see if I can feed a question to the script for it to search.

I needed to figure out what goes after “.com/” for google to search. I went to google and typed in a search. How to play basketball.

https://www.google.com/#q=how+to+play+basketball

The important part of the link is everything following the “.com/” Google uses “#q=” and a “+” symbol for every space. Simply add the “#q=” to the system and then create a variable to substitute spaces for “+” symbols.

text = gets.chomp text.gsub!(“ ”,“+”) system(“open”, “http://www.google.com/#q=text”)

Ideally, this would turn all the white spaces to a ‘+“ and we start with the ’/#q=.‘ It is exact to the google search. This did not work. The # kept changing into ’%23’ when opens the google browser. When I type “How do I play basketball?” =>

http://www.google.com/%23q=%7BURI.escape(@question)%7D It also leads to an error page. The browser is encoding # => %23. I had such a hard time figuring out how to either solve or get around this problme. I figured that there was no way of me to control google from changing # into %23. I needed another solution.

Breaking what I have done is found another way google searches. The escape method defined in the ruby doc, “Escapes the string, replacing all unsafe characters with code.” Basically when i input a question with all the ‘unsafe’ symbols, and spaces with safe code Here is my final code.

http://www.google.com/search?q=#{URI.escape(@question)}

Lastly, if you have any recommendations for me to improve this script or a vision of where you think this could go. Please feel free to share with me at my twitter handle. – @johnmoon6

Visit the repo

The idea is that I run the nomouse.rb script and it will prompt a message, ‘What is your question?’ then the user will input a question they have. This triggers your default browser to open and google search the question.

Using Vim is one of the most amazingly frustrating, confusing, rewarding, and geeking out feeling ever. If you asked me how to copy something in Vim you were out of luck, because I couldn’t even navigate folders and files in vim.

This journey of teaching myself Vim with the help of Eric from LA has been a very rewarding. I still have to use Sublime rarely when I want to copy big chunkcs of code on a chat or my gist page, but give me another week and I am confident I’ll figure it out.

Having used Sublime for quite some time now, here are some a list of things that each editor does better.

Vim

1. Move around super fast. I installed relative numbers so that I can go to the exact line I want to change.
2. No mouse. It’s self explainatory.
3. You feel awesome slowly mastering and the in’s and out’s of the editor.
4. I don’t know when the learning curve ceiling ends. I learn something new to improve my day to day coding every days.

Sublime

1. Super easy to use. Basically no learning curve.
2. Command-p is a little bit better than Vim’s. E.G. Searching for file apple_to_go.rb. In sublime you can type apple to go and it will search for you. In vim you have to pretty much type it exactly how it is. If you put a space between words it won’t suggest any results.
3. Copy and paste is terribly easy.

Quick tips to learning Vim

1. Read vimtutor in your terminal
2. Watch how people move around files. Through videos, mentor, or friend.
3. Learn how to move around. I find this the most important part in Vim. You want to jump lines, words, paragraphs, and screens comfortably and efficiently, less key strokes the better.
4. Keep going at it. It gets easier and becomes fun getting things right!

Overall I think it is important to improve and increase the tools in your development toolbox and Vim is definitely a big improvement for me. I see myself working towards understand vim in a deeper level in the upcoming weeks. I am excited to see what more I can do with this new found tool.

    November 11 is the first day of class. This is a high intensity program to teach and push the group to become junior software developers, roughly 1 year epxerience in the Ruby on Rails (RoR) world.

    The reason I chose to attend such a program is because it aligns with my goal of building a successful business from scratch. I want to experience the full spectrum of starting and running a business… even to it’s fall. I’ll have to take everything in, for my next business. I was hesitant to drop 10 grand and leave my full time job to this fairytale of a dream and join Launch Academy, where I couldn’t find much information about the process, hire rates, and simply information about the quality of the program compared to Dev Bootcamp and App Academy.

    My fear quickly dissipated when I heard Ben Orenstein talk about these popular bootcamps. He said he noticed trends of these popular bootcamps emerging and though it was great. He mentioned that it really wasn’t the quality of these bootcamps that makes you a great developer, but your own desire to learn and be great. I’m paraphrasing, but that was the gist.

    I’m exicted to start on Monday and become a great programmer. I want to be the best of the class and I’ll work hard to make a mark. Cheer for me :D