Environment Setup Tips & Tricks

This past week as I was trying to create a new Rails project, I kept running into gem issues.  It seemed like whatever gem I was trying to update wasn’t compatible with the other gemfiles/ Rails/ Ruby version I had.  I would find a fix and then encounter the problem again with a different gem.…

A Quick Tutorial with React.js

React.js seems to be on the tip of developer’s minds.  Instagram, Facebook and Khan Academy use it. It’s fast, light-weight and let’s face it, sexy.  So what exactly is React.js? React.js is an open source JavaScript library that provides a view from HTML. (So think of it as the V in the MVC.)  It just focuses…

Brownfield Projects: Lessons Learned

One of the biggest differences between school projects and real-world projects, besides the sheer magnitude, is the fact that most developers working in companies, don’t work on a code base that is there own.  Working on your own code base or writing a project from the ground up is called a greenfield project, and predominantly what…

Ruby on Rails: An Introduction

After much anticipation, last Monday we began Ruby on Rails.  I can see why we waited as long as we did.  Creating a basic Rails project is significantly easier than building it up from scratch using Ruby (like we did with projects like HTTP: Yeah You Know Me and Black Thursday in Module 1) and…

Building a Site Analytics Application

Last week we were assigned a project that required us to recreate a smaller, less user-friendly version of Google Analytics. Our instructors expected the application to accept a curl request from the command line with the url link of the page and a payload that included information about an HTTP request. This input would look…

Writing D.R.Y code

Don’t Repeat Yourself. It’s what is instilled in us at an early developer age. Repetition is seen as something to avoid. So, once you have gotten your code functional and tests passing, refactoring is the next step.  Looking fora repetition is a great starting place, as it is easy to spot.  Here’s an example of a…

Test Driven Development, in a nutshell

There’s this big thing in software development; employers are looking for it, our instructors demand it in class, it’s TDD: Test Driven Development.  This process stems from the idea that great programs are built best when we have the right tests in place before hand.  Well-written tests can give a developer a good idea of…

The Developer (Student) Diet

My first week at Turing I read an article titled, “Your app makes me fat.” The article discussed a study that found people who expend more cognitive energy,  use less energy for self-control. So when deciding what to eat, people who have spent their day on strenuous cognitive tasks, are more likely to choose the greasy fast food spot…

Recursion and Fibonacci meet.

I first learned about recursion last week during our Sorting Suite project.  The project consisted of writing three programs; one for bubble sort, one for insertion sort and one for merge sort.  Merge Sort involves recursion.  If you’re not familiar with it, there’s a great dance that highlights what the sort actually does. Anyway, while…

Why I chose Turing

With the myriad of options for coding boot camps out there, finding the perfect school can seem overwhelming.  In the fall, after scoring an almost perfect score on my midterm at my evening programming class, I decided I wanted to pursue Computer Science full time. I was not willing to redo my undergrad degree. I…