What I Did

1. Today I further refactored controller related things mostly in comments_controller.rb and votes_controller.rb.
2. I wrote integration tests for up/down voting for the simple case in which a given post has no votes currently.

What I Learned

1. JavaScript-related goodness
   • JavaScript can make requests to a server, parse it’s response and update parts of a page, effectively bypassing the typical request-response cycle, allowing for slick, front-end interactions.
   • CoffeeScript is a small language that conveniently compiles into JavaScript.
   • Unobtrusive JavaScript is a general approach to the use of JavaScript in web pages including separation of functionality from a Web page’s structure/content and presentation. Ajax is predicated by unobtrusive JavaScript. Ajax can be triggered by setting the attribute data-remote: true within a given form.
2. Object-relational mapping (ORM) - is a programming technique for converting data between incompatible type systems in object-oriented programming languages. This creates a virtual object database that can be used from within the programming language. ActiveRecord is the default object-relational mapping library for Rails.
3. Memoization is the process of storing a computed value to avoid duplicated work by future calls. This is a handy technique for accessing instance variables in much less time than allowing however many lines of code within a given method to run each time one seeks to retrieve a oft-required variable.
4. Session and params are only available to the controller. Specs are do not have access (inherently) to these resources.
5. Setting null constraints on text columns may generate problems down the line (especially when working with MySQL).
6. FactoryGirl traits allows for unique factories to be generated efficiently.
7. Pry and the Capybara save_and_open_page method are the best thing to ever happen to Ruby on Rails.
8. Implementing a counter cache when appropriate is a good alternative to excessive database access through repetitive SQL calls.

What I Still Don’t Understand

1. After rebasing a given branch with another, I’ve been simply force pushing the updated branch to GitHub, and I’m not sure if there is a more appropriate action to take (although I’m suspicious there is).

What I’d Like To Learn

1. I’d like to get more and more familiar with the internal of Ruby and Rails, because I feel that my surface level understanding is fine and dandy for a link aggregator site, but won’t do me enough good for debugging a full-scale production site that is actually heavily utilized in real life.