DEV Community: Andrew Cook

Demolition Permit Visualizer

Andrew Cook — Mon, 21 Aug 2023 15:26:50 +0000

Over the weekend I made this web application with ruby on rails and Sinatra: https://chicago-demolition-permit-records-parser.onrender.com/ .

It was inspired by a project detailed in this blog post: https://mascontext.com/observations/after-demolition .

It aims to make parsing and visualizing Chicago demolition permit records easy.

The main challenge was getting the google maps api to render an image with multiple markers. Constructing a valid URL was more complicated than I expected.

Unfortunately, I realized too late that the api did not provide dated entries so searching by date would require collecting the permit number and searching through a response to another api to match the permit number and then collecting the date information from that api. I assumed the permit information was not exactly chronological and thus, for my purposes, an unordered collection. This would result in, in my estimation, an O(n2) time complexity where n is equal to the number of permits that need to be dated. On top of this poor time complexity the execution time is made slower by being composed of asynchronous calls to an API. (If you see a flaw in this logic, please comment, and let me know how to make this work!)

Despite this downturn, I would consider this app functional and a successful endeavor in ruby!

Server in Axum

Andrew Cook — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 02:37:24 +0000

I spent some time over the last 3 days working on a server for a web application I dreamed up some time ago.

I am primarily using the Axum and SQLx crates to implement this project, but I am also relying on the reqwest and serde crates to populate the database and serialize/deserialize JSON respectively.

All of these crates work remarkably well out of the box and all of the issues I ran into were syntactic in nature.

I have written several GET, POST and DELETE routes which will be helpful when I build out the frontend with async methods. (I had started on the frontend some weeks ago. It is written in Yew which is a React-like crate for Rust, and it currently just displays some custom structs in the browser -- with no CSS involved.)

The next step on the backend is to implement User Authorization and a way to issue user tokens.

Any tips on anything I have covered or on the development lifecycle in general would be much appreciated.

Andrew

Ruby Gym Sprint

Andrew Cook — Sun, 16 Jul 2023 22:28:12 +0000

Today I completed about 10 assigned Ruby exercises on Canvas. I managed to complete this sprint in < 1.5 hours.

Some classics included "Two Fer", "Raindrops" and "Leap Year".

I had already completed the majority of these exercises (in the Ruby Track) on exercism but I decided to write my solutions from scratch on Canvas.

In the next few days I will delve into http requests, continue practicing on exercism, and work on some projects in other languages.

Forays in Ruby

Andrew Cook — Sat, 15 Jul 2023 01:24:53 +0000

Today I worked on several Ruby modules. I worked through these modules relatively quickly, as I have been preparing with exercism. Here's a link to my public facing profile on that site: https://exercism.org/profiles/MetaWorldComputing.

So far, I like Ruby's clean syntax and the speed with which it allows me to write functional code. However, it does have a reputation of incurring performance costs, so I will continue my endeavors learning Rust web frameworks.

That's all for now,

Andrew

Hello internet

Andrew Cook — Wed, 12 Jul 2023 19:06:50 +0000

Will be posting frequently in the coming weeks.