DEV Community: CailieS

Seeking Validation

CailieS — Wed, 13 Jan 2021 19:12:50 +0000

One of the first things I did in my rails project after setting up model associations was setting up my model validations.

Simply put, validations exist to prevent invalid data from being saved to your database. The well on things you can do with validations is deep, but for the sake of my rails project, The Undertower, I just needed some quick and easy validations.

Originally I thought this was going to be a more difficult process than it turned out to be. Because the validations I needed were pretty simple, it went by pretty quickly. My reviews model checks for the presence of a name for the review, the review itself, and a star rating. Because the star rating turned out to be a little different than the previous two, I needed to spend some time on Google. I wound up writing it so it checks for numeric value and set parameters for how many stars someone could leave.

Outside of that my validations wound up being pretty standard: Book checks for name and title, review validations check for a name and content, and user validations check for basic login information.

This isn't Bowling, This is Sinatra, There are Rules.

CailieS — Thu, 05 Nov 2020 19:28:16 +0000

I've always appreciated the past time of an afternoon or evening at the local bowling alley. Locals of all ages gather to hang out at the bowling alley to throw on a pair of ugly shoes and spend a few hours with their friends.

I have a few friends who became rather serious about bowling however, and spend a lot of their time traveling around to different tournaments to bowl against other teams and meet people from all over the place. So I thought it would be cool to create a place where teams can check out local tournaments in their area, and also post about different tournaments in their area. And so I created 'Let's Go Bowling!'

I started off this project a touch overconfident about what it was going to take to make this project. I told myself I had it down and that, because I had done a lot of the labs well that I didn't have much to worry about.

And then, well, I got lost in the details. When I initially wrote my code, I could log in, I could create and view tournaments, and beyond that, every time I fixed one bug, something broke somewhere else. Routes were out of order, my login was being finicky, I would forget an equal sign that would change everything. A time was had by all.

I learned to get scrappy with how I coded, I learned about how every little detail counts and how it plays into the bigger picture, I learned a lot about why what worked in the labs worked in my code. I learned how to breathe and walk away when I've been staring at code for so long.

Fear and Loathing with a CLI

CailieS — Mon, 31 Aug 2020 21:18:59 +0000

The biggest lesson I learned with how to build a CLI from scratch is how to mind my own hubris.

Up until the start of project mode I had the labs down. I chased the green passing methods relentlessly, I thought the project was going to be a breeze, I thought I had this, I thought wrong. When I actually started to code I realized that the undertaking was a lot bigger than I thought it was going to be and I maybe didn't know things as well as I thought I did. I started to panic.

The New York Times Book section has always been a favorite section of mine, I have found a few of my favorite books reading their reviews and opinion pieces. So when it came down to coming up with an idea for a project, I thought about doing a New York Times API. So I decided to make a CLI that used and API that pulled book summaries from the New York Times and provided summaries for those books.

My biggest struggle with writing the API class was getting lost in the details. I'd get so focused on some small side thing that I would loose sight of the bigger picture. In the future, when writing a program from scratch, I definitely want to come up with a plan of action before I actually start to code.

When all is said and done though, as hard as it was, I'm really proud of myself for finishing the project. It really brought home topics I wasn't very strong in to begin with and I learned a lot of in depth coding. It was a very cool process to be able to use what I've learned so far to make something like a CLI, and to also use those skills to learn things I needed to know to finish the project. As much sleep as I lost stressed about this project, I would absolutely do it again.

How I Learned to Trick Out Myspace and Love the Code

CailieS — Tue, 21 Apr 2020 01:03:07 +0000

Like many my age, I was first introduced to writing code in the early days of MySpace. There was nothing like the satisfaction of figuring out how to get hot pink cascading sparkles or black and chartreuse vertical stripes while my favorite Fall Out Boy or Fugazi song blared in the background. I spent a good amount of time prowling the internet for new tips and tricks to deck out my page. When I graduated from high school and joined a band, I continued to learn as much as I could to trick out my bands website and create our internet presence. It was becoming a really solid past time.

When I decided to go to college though, I chose to follow other passions and studied Journalism and the Humanities. I built a colorful career for myself, there was no article I wouldn't write, no gig too strange, no tour too long. However for the past while now, I have been looking for something a little more secure, something that is challenging in a different way, something that doesn't require leaving home for months at a time. I couldn't really put my finger on it.

While visiting my native waters of California last fall, I found myself at one of my old haunts with an even older friend. She recently had some successes at her job as a Software Engineer and I spent a lot of time asking her questions, getting her insights, learning about her job. She encouraged me to look into it, especially since I had previously shown interest in coding, I was uncertain about it at first, but after spending a few months on the fence about it, I decided to finally take the leap.