What I Did

Today I went through my app to clean up obvious things here and there. Today is technically the deadline for when I was scheduled to have completed all of the delineated functionality for Haxxor-News. On a whole, I’ve accomplished the bare minimum for implementing said tasks. Before I feel comfortable releasing my app to the world, there is still a ton of improvements that I ought to make.

What I Learned

1. Most databases have a concept of a sequence which auto increments as it is used. ActiveRecord uses the underlying database sequence to create primary keys. This phenomenon explains why after having destroyed all records related to a given model, the record id’s of newly created models were starting at numbers greater than zero…
2. One should never neglect the back-trace of rails logs.
3. Scopes are useful for selecting sub-collections of a given collection based on desired parameters. I will likely need to organize various scopes within a helper file that can be called with particular parameters to generate subsets of record collections like posts (ordering by date and vote ratings).

What I Still Don’t Understand

1. I’m still very unclear on how to modify attributes in previous migration files and re-run migrations to ensure that everything is still intact. Today, I attempted to add null: false to a few attributes for my comment model, which broke my application. I was able to get things running again only after resetting my database and re-seeding it with freshly generated fake users and posts. Although this is not a big deal in development, I’ve got to know better for production.

What I’d Like To Learn

1. I’m interested in getting my FED skills to a bare minimum especially because I’ve reached the point that my current app is at a bare minimum level in terms of structure.