The rest of this series can be found here.

Setting up a Public Instance

Today, I’m working on setting up a public instance of this app, since must apps aren’t built just to run on the dev’s local computer. I initially tried running on the server I host several other sites on, but it’s a shared host running Ruby 1.8.7 and Rails 2.3.18, so it’s significantly behind current, and I’m unable to update it.

I could easily run on AWS, Google Cloud, etc., but since this is mainly a self-educational project, I don’t want to pour money into keeping a server running just to host it. Continue reading “Days 12–14: Setting up a Public Instance”

The rest of this series can be found here.

Unfortunately, I skipped a couple of days on this project due to project workload. Continue reading “Day 11: Sorting and Other Miscellany”

The rest of this series can be found here.

Today, I start adding due dates to the to-do items. I’m still enjoyably surprised by how easy it is to add more fields and the corresponding logic to a Ruby on Rails app. Continue reading “Days 9–10: Adding Due Dates (named routes and other adventures)”

The rest of this series can be found here.

Over the weekend, I worked on this project on my wife’s laptop instead of my main machine, so ran into a couple of issues getting set up. First, rails wouldn’t run, but $ bundle install took care of that problem. Then I had to run $ rake db:migrate to get the database set up, but ran into similar issues as yesterday. At some point, I changed the name of the constant used to add the boolean field, but the migration file still had the old class name. Once I changed that, $ rake db:migrate ran just fine.

Next, I needed to add a few todo items to have some data to work with. For whatever reason, adding new todos worked fine on my main machine, but when I tried to add a new item, I was getting a “First argument in form cannot contain nil or be empty” error. Turns out I had never defined the “new” action in the controller. Took care of that and the app was back in business. Continue reading “Days 6–8: Fixing Bugs, Adding Features”

The rest of this series can be found here.

This post is a combination of days 4–5; I tried to build the app from scratch by memory but ended up following the getting started guide again somewhat, with modifications as necessary.

Continue reading “Days 4–5: Building the Checklist App”

The rest of this series can be found here.

Day 3: time to start working on a project from scratch without following a guide. I’m intentionally not taking one of numerous online classes for several reasons:

• More freedom to explore
• More work figuring out how to do something rather than just re-typing or copying/pasting from a guide (and hopefully, more learning)

Starting today, I’ll be working on a simple to-do/checklist app; I don’t have as much time today, so probably will just sketch out the basics of the app and not get too deep into code today. Here goes. Continue reading “Day 3: Starting a Checklist App”

The rest of this series can be found here.

Made it the rest of the way through the introductory tutorial today.

MVC (model-view-controller) is a neat concept once you get your head around it—the separation of logic vs. data is much stronger than most hand-coded HTML/PHP or WP templates achieve.

Turns out I didn’t need that link to the article from the index page, as it was part of the documentation only one step later…but I often get “good ideas” and jump a few steps ahead without even knowing it. Continue reading “Day 2: Finishing the (Sample) Blog”

A word of introduction: this year, I’m planning actively work on learning some new languages and skills, rather than just learning things as I need them for a particular project. My plan is to spend 30 days on each technology, taking about an hour to work on the skill and then about half an hour to write about what I learned.

If you have questions, feel free to comment, but keep in mind that these series are primarily for my own learning, and by no means will I be an expert at any of them by the end of the 30 days. Continue reading “Day 1: Getting Started with Ruby on Rails”

The rest of this series can be found here.

After working on this project a few days, I think I need a cheat sheet for my own reference. Continue reading “Day 0: Cheatsheet”