Day 15

All about the learning.

In a bid to maximise my time I can be found on the train into train brow furrowed, head down and working on my laptop (to the point that I’ve managed to completely ignore people I know sitting opposite me – yep, I can get focussed) but it’s not really all working, it’s mostly learning, it’s about keeping my skills sharp and relevant, so even if some of the work I’m doing in my day to day isn’t programming I’m still looking at code, still learning my craft.  At the moment the list feels quite long and a little disjointed but in mind it almost makes sense.  By looking at and playing with lots of different technologies I’m making it easier to learn them and be a better programmer, as I port learning from one technology / toolset into another.  So by learning Ruby on Rails it helps me with Test Driven Development (TDD) and also the PHP framework Laravel.  By working with Codecademy it helps with my JavaScript (which I’m hoping will help with D3) and Python which will help with the MongoDB course and so it goes on.

Day 11

Yep if I don’t keep this up I’ll lose count.

Today started off well with me playing with D3.js on the train on the way in, and also finding out that my RoR code that I have in Github had passed its tests in Travis-CI – ok so it had also passed the tests on my laptop but it had taken me a couple of steps to get the right YML file to make it work in Travis.  Thanks to this article on Stack Overflow I found the magic was to do with the Rake DB Migrate task (I was on the right track which was nice)

My .travis.yml file is now like this:

language: ruby
rvm:
- 1.9.3
env:
- DB=sqlite
script:
- RAILS_ENV=test bundle exec rake db:migrate --trace
- bundle exec rake db:test:prepare
- bundle exec rspec spec/
bundler_args: --binstubs=./bundler_stubs

Which made things work, now every time I push my code to Github it will be grabbed and tested by Travis, overkill for a sample app with a known outcome, but good practice.

The down part was getting into the office I was working today and losing one of the rubber earbuds from my earphones, as I type this I’m listening to music in half stereo (not mono) and being subjected to the noise of my fellow commuters.

Once in to the office du jour it was down to some data and SQL checking, not too much of an issue except this was SQL including some lovely CTE queries that I hadn’t looked at in over 3 months, took a while to get going with it, and there were some changes to make (of course) with the client “helping” me write my code. Still managed to validate the results from the queries and client is happy and of course a happy client is what we all want.

So heading back home and more D3.js awesomeness. (and writing a blog post)
;-)