Monday, Week 3

#ruby #webdev #beginners

We finished our first Model View Controller today. A cookbook repository with web scraping using Nokogiri to grab recipe names, ratings and descriptions from a popular website. The debugging was a slog. The finished product however was incredibly satisfying. Last year someone on stackoverflow told me I should "start thinking in terms of Object Oriented Programming". After an hour of reading around I still wasn't sure what he meant exactly. I'm beginning to now though. The code I've been writing this week is a far cry from the endless lines of repitition and method after method with no inheritance that I'd been asking for help with a year ago.
MVC is tricky to be sure, I'm making stupid mistakes with getters and setters but I'm also able to track those mistakes down. It feels good.
I ate a whole pizza for lunch today. Pineapple cheese and meatballs. No comma there, the cheese was pineapple flavored. It sounds egregious and it was. When I sat back down at my computer all I wanted to do was get under the desk and take a nap. But I managed to force myself through the haze of dough and got on with adding a mark_as_done method to the cookbook. I don't normally have such a stupid lunch but I've been living in Chengdu for four years. There's a limit to the variety of foreign food there and since arriving in Shanghai three weeks ago I've been indulging myself a little. Sometimes, when you haven't been back to your own country for two years, you need to give yourself a big pizza for lunch. Tomorrow I'll go with rice and beans.
As the evening's live code started I noticed that one of the remote students had asked me for help. An hour before. It's the second time I missed someone asking for help and I felt bad for not catching the message. I need to keep an eye on my slack notifications when I'm dialled in.
Tomorrow we're building four MVCs. It took us two days to make one. This is going to be interesting. I'm not sure how they're going to communicate unless it's just a question of attr_accessor. I guess we'll find out tomorrow. Take care x