Galen's Adventures in Programming

Last week, my original Launch Academy cohort graduated!  It was great seeing them all again, and hearing them talk about the job search that is just beginning.  A group of graduates asked if I would be interested in helping with a project they were going to start, which was really kind of them (if any of you are reading this, thank you!)  It was such a compliment that, even without the schooling I will acquire before the end of my bootcamp, they still thought I could contribute and asked me to join them.   We're going to be working on a multi-person gaming app, and hit upon Uno as a game we could emulate.  It will be really hard working on a Rails app when I haven't worked with Rails or Databases (yet!) but it occurred to me this morning that working with them is probably the best thing I could do to prepare me for the job market.  Even with the depth of knowledge that I will acquire at Launch Academy, a bootcamp cannot equate to the years of experience that my coworker

I had an interesting conversation with one of my classmates yesterday.  She said that she had struggled with last week's lesson in compound data structures using Ruby, so I asked if she would like some help. Rather than tackle compound data structures as a whole, I tried to break the problem down into its components.  I figured that the three main pieces of utilizing compound data structures (at least in the way that we were taught at Launch Academy) were arrays, hashes, and each loops. We talked about arrays for a while, and I came up with what will now be my go-to example: a swim meet.  Let's say our friend Billy is competing in a race.  He's in lane 3, and we want to cheer him on.  The swimming pool can be represented by an array with each item being an individual swimmer. swimming_pool = ["Sam", "Jane", "Billy", "John"] We have to use the index of his lane in order to make sure that Billy hears our message.   puts &qu

I haven't been able to work on my Dominion Card Designer as much as I would have liked this week, but that's what happens when homework and finding a new apartment get in the way.   I'm writing up a list of FAQ's for the Card Designer, which will go on the Welcome page after getting a user's name.  These FAQ's will let a user know what the Card Designer is for, as well as how to use it.  Right now I've only shown the app to people who are familiar with the game of Dominion, so having FAQ's will make it much easier for other people to figure out what I'm talking about.

This past weekend, my brother and I went through the Heroku docs and modified the files within my app until it matched up with what Heroku required for deployment.  Voila!  I have an app: Dominion Card Designer . You may notice that the url is slightly better than gibberish - that's my next project.  I bought the domain 'msgalenwhite.com', and will be working with Google's Docs to set up a redirect from that site to the app.  I will also be going through Heroku's Docs to try and change the actual url to something a little better than "Stark-reef-22221." What I did today was something that I've been looking forward to for a while.  Now that the basic function of my site works, I want to upgrade the Card Designer Form.  I had been thinking for a while about having things like Cost, Actions and Buys as input fields with up and down arrows, so people on mobile could hit a button to increase something, rather than having to input so many numbers using

I met up with some of the people from my new Launch Academy cohort, and in the midst of answering one of their questions I discovered an erroneous assumption that I had been making. When I first encountered a structure like a Javascript JSON literal or Ruby hash, it was the Python dictionary.  Dictionaries in Python look just like the hash in Ruby, so I had been operating under the assumption that they worked the same.  The main thing I remember from my class in Python was that dictionaries store things without order.   Therefore, when a problem came along in my Ruby homework that involved finding a hash value greater than 1 value but less than the next, I had written an answer assuming that I couldn't just go through the hash top to bottom until I found a range that fit my number. It wasn't until I was comparing answers with my cohort that I realized their solution involved a simple .each loop, and I had to challenge my assumption! As a side note, in trying to see whet