Code is Life

Moving away from ENV One of the challenges that cropped up during this projects was that we had to use Omniauth to allow a user to sign in via Facebook, Google, or the like. Problem I had was that even after following online tutorials it still wasn't functioning as it should.  Through trial and error I discovered that it had something to do with using the ENV variable. After doing my homework there was a lot of suggestions to use the new Rails Credentials setup.  This was a bit more difficult as adding credentials to the credentials.yml.enc file isn't as simple as just pasting them in. First you have to get into your credentials.yml.enc file.  If you just open it you'll notice it has a single line of hexadecimal code. Do not edit this directly. To edit this file you'l need to enter the follow command in your terminal: EDITOR="atom --wait" rails credentials:edit  Replace "atom" with your own editor.  This will bring up the file you need to ...

Our challenge this week was to build a web app using what we had learned about Sinatra and ActiveRecord. It was pretty straightforward: Build an app that allows you to organize something via forms and a database. I decided to build an app to create and organize recipes but to utilize the LCARS system. LCARS stands for Library Computer Access/Retrieval System and was created by Michael Okuda for the Star Trek tv series. The skeleton of the app was fairly easy.  Through the course of the lessons leading up to it we had pretty much already built the app.  There was just a few couple of things that I found challenging. Challenge One: LCARS I knew what I wanted to do but not how to do it.  So began the research.  There being many Star Trek fans there where also many ways of going about this.  The most straight forward was using HTML and CSS.  The problem: We hadn't learned much about either of those yet. Through days of reading everything I c...

M*A*S*H Scraper Project Project Parameters: Build a CLI program using Ruby that utilizes website scraping or an API This was the first project we had to do, the first time we would utilize the things we had learned so far. The project goal was to use scraping or an API to gather information from a website of our choice and then use that information tp build a CLI(Command Line Interface) program. The first thing I had to learn was how to use a gem called "Nokogiri" to scrap the website.  Nokogiri creates special nodes that are sorted into arrays that make it so they can be accessed and iterate over.  The result being the information you wanted.  This presented my first big challenge: CSS selectors. To filter through these Nokogiri nodes you use CSS selectors.  To determine what selectors to use you have to use a combination of the pry method and inspecting the code of the website.  I had difficulty at first with this as none of the selector...

My Journey Begins About a month ago I decided it was time to change my life.  I've worked hard; restaurants, factories, warehouses even pest control.  Hard, physical, mind numbing work.  I decided, as I approach 40 years old, that it was time to work smart. Technology  has always been a big interest for me so I began looking into industries in technology that caught my attention.  Software Engineering is what I was most interested in so, with the help and support of my family, I signed up for a coding boot camp with www.flatironschool.com. This is my journey.