DEV Community: Simon Toledano

Slaying the Ruby Gym Godzilla

Simon Toledano — Fri, 11 Aug 2023 02:40:26 +0000

Ruby Gym was the definition of delayed gratification. At first, taking on each exercise was challenging and frustrating to be honest, but I tried to carve out a chunk of time each day to chip away it. At the Leap Year exercise, I felt stuck for some time but decided to walk away from it and sure enough the following day it took me 10 minutes to wrap my head around how I wanted to finish my code. I think at the Secret Encoder exercise I finally felt like I was "getting it". I realized writing code is feeling so much more gratifying with a couple of wins under my belt. I am definitely feeling more confident each day. Here are some big takeaways from completing the Ruby Gym module:

The .each method is super helpful to access objects within an array and apply some action/block of code to each item. It really is a powerful method that I will use with large collections of data.
The .gsub method is my best friend. No, but in all seriousness, it is super helpful for reformatting characters. I will end up using it a lot in the future.
Instead of trying to work hastily and inadvertently make a problem more complicated, remember to break down complex problems into smaller parts (thank God for sticky notes). On a couple of the Ruby Gym exercises I found myself working hastily but not efficiently. I ended up having to work longer and inefficiently since I made mistakes I later needed to clean up within my code.

Altogether, the Ruby Gym exercises were tough but definitely gratifying. I am novice when it comes to this coding game, but I am definitely excited for what the future holds. I will continue to work hard and persevere. Onward and upwards my friends!

TIL Day 4 HTML and Ruby

Simon Toledano — Wed, 26 Jul 2023 14:32:10 +0000

I decided to do some reflecting before moving forward on any of my assignments since it has been days since I last posted. Here are some recent learnings:

There is a difference between flex-items and flex-containers (obvious for me now). Flex-containers are elements whose display value property is an HTML element (often the parent element) whose display property's value is flex or inline-flex. Flex-items are the direct children of a flex-container (a parent element).
When working on the styling you should use the following hack to better see each element on the page: * { border: thin red solid; }
Ruby has built-in skills called methods which enables the interpreter to read and show you results within a console
Ruby can do some neat computations: addition +, subtraction -, multiplication *, division/, exponents **, and modulo %.
Ruby allows for us to get user input by using get.chomp. Retrieving user input through this method felt very different in comparison to HTML, so I was initially thrown off but that's life.

Anyways, my first impression of Ruby is that it is a beast, but I am down for the challenge. I hope to keep trudging on through the Codecademy Ruby course these next couple days.

Slowing Down to Enjoy the Journey - TIL Day 3

Simon Toledano — Fri, 21 Jul 2023 03:07:52 +0000

I decided to pump the breaks today and went back to review some basics around HTML.

Here are some of my key learnings from today:

The <!DOCTYPE html declaration should be the first line within a HTML
Info related to the web page like the title should be within the <head> on the particular page
Anchor tags a are helpful when trying to link an internal page, external page, and content within the same page
id can be added to a to create sections and be able to jump to each of them.
Be mindful of indentation when writing code so it is easier to read code and understand relationships between elements.

TIL Day 2

Simon Toledano — Thu, 20 Jul 2023 03:30:08 +0000

Today, I learned all about the fundamentals of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). It took me a lot longer than I envisioned to complete the Codecademy lesson, but I am beginning to get the hang of it. Something that stayed with me is how much HTML and CSS speak to one another and how important it is to keep in mind readability and maintainability of a HTML file when writing it. I think tomorrow I will review chaining; I struggled majorly with it. I understand when writing a CSS rule it allows for two or more selectors at the same time, but I am still feeling a little confused about its usefulness. Although today felt a little more strenuous, I am still feeling hopeful about this opportunity and I am relieved to be making incremental wins everyday.

TIL Day 1

Simon Toledano — Wed, 19 Jul 2023 02:07:20 +0000

Today, I started the journey in learning how to code. While I am entirely new to this, I am excited to make incremental wins towards becoming a software developer. Today was interesting, I started off with the Hello, World! assignment and I found it fascinating to utilize the repository on GitHub and had fun using CodeSpace to deploy my first app. Woot woot! After taking a much needed break, I began the work of becoming familiar with HTML. The language seems intuitive and relatively straightforward. It was really energizing to see my work build in the terminal and develop the HTML page overtime. I really hope to carry my momentum into tomorrow learnings on CSS and I am praying tomorrow is as productive.