What I Did

I spent a good part of my day developing a sign up page which was a great exercise in unit testing, and user validations. The interns met up on two separate occasions to finalize our decision on what the goal and intended audience of our group project ought to be. We’ve decided that the site ought to present data intertwined with stories in order to generate understanding, empathy, and energy in readers who we mostly intend to be college students, as the site seeks to expose the issue of sexual assault on college campuses.

What I Learned

Incidentally, I learned about the all important params hash, how to access Gravatars for user home pages, and I’ve gained insight into how the new and create controller actions work towards creating new users in the database. Aside from that, I had a miraculous tutoring session with Eli today, which essentially comprised of me attacking him with my ignorance for a solid hour. The list of concepts that are now clarified for me include the following.

• merging with git
• the need to restart rails server between checking out branches if
• The difference between git add -A, git add . and git add *
• Where in the heck Rails application logs are displayed
• The difference between modules and classes
• Declaring parameter types for methods in Ruby
• the innards of db:migrate and db:rollback as well as the difference between running those commands with or without bundle rake preceding them.
• How the heck web requests and responses all work from way high up.
• How to use and what to include in .gitignore

Due to the productivity and helpfulness of our session, we’re looking to continue such meetings twice a week, and try to focus our sessions on pair programming, i.e. digging right into the code as much as possible.

What I Still Don’t Understand

I’m still slightly rusty on HTTP protocol and the nitty gritty behind how the Internet really works.

What I’m Interested in Learning

Due to sitting in on the design orientation meeting today, I missed my first opportunity for attending the bi-weekly dev meeting which apparently was about the make utility and the Phoenix web framework which uses Elixir. Eli tells me that there’s a palpable degree of hype regarding said technologies which points to the possibility of Rails falling into the cracks. So much for this internship…

By the way, I will attempt to lay out my proceeding blog posts in this format, just so that I ramble less and make my points more efficiently. Less creative, but more precise.