DEV Community: Paulina Delmore

TIL - Heroku and postgresql

Paulina Delmore — Tue, 28 Mar 2023 03:14:18 +0000

Today I was working on my portfolio website. It's still not completely done, but I am happy with how it's turning out. I learned a few new things in the process:

I deployed my first two projects on Heroku,
I learned about Rack gem and how to use it to create a static page in Rails. I made an empty app and pushed it to GitHub just to have it handy whenever I want to deploy a static page to Heroku,
that being said, I learned that Heroku doesn't support sqlite3, so I had to look up how to switch to postgresql instead,
oh, and I connected my domain to my portfolio hosted on GitHub pages.

Overall, it was a pretty productive day!

TIL - teamwork is hard

Paulina Delmore — Sat, 25 Mar 2023 16:36:49 +0000

We stayed on our first group project yesterday. The biggest takeaway from the very first meeting with a team - collaboration is hard and it's a skill that some, if not all, people develop over time.
I am looking forward to learning from others and getting this project done!

TIL 3

Paulina Delmore — Wed, 15 Mar 2023 16:55:56 +0000

I've been working on my final project for a couple of weeks now, and I hit a few roadblocks in terms of the functionality that I know how to achieve vs the functionality that I want in my project that I thought I had no idea how to implement. One of them was table pagination. During a brief conversation with the instructor he assured me that it's something I should be able to do with the knowledge of basic Ruby and Rails that I have so far. And, as it turns out, he was right.

What I wanted to achieve:

split the records in the table into chunks (10 per page)
display those chunks on consecutive pages
links "previous page" and "next page" to navigate the records
first page has disabled "previous" link
last page has disabled "next" link

What I needed:
The instructor noted I probably needed to use params, as well as .limit and .offset methods. Since we haven't talked about the two methods in class, I had to read up on those first.

What I did:
First, I wrote my steps in a form of comments:

    # set notes_per_page number
    # set params (:page), default to 0
    # define pagination limit and offset - limit is notes_per_page, offset is notes_per_page * page params
    # get number of notes
    # get number of pages, convert to float
    # divide page_number by notes_per_page, round, to integer
    # get last page - rounded_page_number minus 1 because count starts at 0

Second, I went comment by comment and wrote the code, one variable at a time. I was amazed at how easy it was to do it after explaining to myself what my code was supposed to achieve first.

Third, I had to figure out how to go about "previous" and "next" buttons. Again, I wrote myself the steps in a mix of Ruby and English:

    # if page param == 0, can't click on "previous", can click on "next"
    # if page param = last_page, can click on "previous", can't click on "next"
    # else can click on both
    # link takes to ?page=<%= page param +/- 1 %>

I know there are much easier, faster and prettier ways of achieving what I just did. But what I've learned is that many features are really easy to create - all is needed is an understanding of what it is we are trying to do, and work one line at a time. That's what's amazing about programming.

And suddenly, the next feature that I wanted to add to my final project - messaging option between the users - doesn't seem as difficult to write as I thought it was!

TIL 2

Paulina Delmore — Fri, 10 Feb 2023 19:45:57 +0000

Difference between .method vs .method! - "!" modifies the object so we can't reference the original object. The "safe method" creates a copy of the object and changes that copy.

.split takes a string and returns an array. Cool!

To access a two-dimensional array we need to use double square brackets => array[1][5]

Ruby seems so easy, yet so complicated at the same time.

TIL 1

Paulina Delmore — Wed, 01 Feb 2023 20:55:31 +0000

It's difficult to spot mistakes and typos in the code that you wrote yourself. I can stare at it for an hour and not realize that all I am missing is a dot. Note to myself: do not stare at the code forever. Move on and get back to it or ask somebody to look at it.