magic comes from work

Day 33

I started Active Record tonight and I’m stoked. Mostly because a lot of the work has already been done and now I can just use the magic that is provided to me. I think I have always had the basic understanding that there are libraries that will be doing a lot of the things I have been learning for me. That is why when I get stuck on things but can still complete projects and labs I just push through. I definitely save bookmarks to go back to if need be but ultimately I want to see how granularly I really need to know some of these concepts before I spend hours learning them deeper. While I know having the deeper understanding is a good thing I also have a timeline I’m working with and can dive deeper into topics once I’ve graduated or have landed a job.

Database migrations are a nice thing to have.

I got stuck for a while tonight because my environment was throwing an error in relation to the JSON gem. Specifically, version 1.8.3 which was in the Gemfile.lock of a few of the labs I’ve worked on tonight. I learned with the help of a Learn Expert (someone who’s around to help out students) that the Gemfile.lock is pretty much a set of dependencies that were used when the files were written and are statically set to keep things consistent. So we deleted that file and ran bundle again and everything worked fine. Luckily I asked why we did what we did so I would know enough to repeat the process tonight. Every time I run into this problem I do raise an issue on GitHub so hopefully, it’ll be taken care of for those following behind me.

I feel like I’m behind on the target I set for myself and I have the Free Code Camp Nashville meetup to go to tomorrow. Plus a wedding shower on Sunday. I still plan to be done with Rack this weekend. That’s 22 lessons/labs. I also am considering adding an extra full day into next week by having my nanny come and watch my girls on Friday. So instead of 3 hours next Friday night, I can hit it hard all day and have a 10 hour day. We’ll see how I feel after Monday’s progress.

Something I did to save some time is now when I generate my static blog files they automatically are put into my proper local file location to be uploaded to the separate repo. That’s a complicated sentence to say, I keep my content in one folder and repo, and my public facing files in another folder and repo. I had been generating the public file then copying and pasting in my file manager. Now the files are generated directly into the proper folder saving me a few steps and speeding up my publishing time.

Time spent today: 2:43
Time spent total: 137:55
Lessons completed today: 5
Lessons completed total: 330