Week 5 Day 2 - Rails shooter

Today: solo day

So, we had the assessment today, which last cycle suggests was one of the hardest ones we'd be seeing, and it went alright. From Sunday where I was almost in tears in frustration at the authentication model, to today, where I was not only able to complete the assessment, getting all segments to pass individually on the third try (initial write, first debug, final run) while understanding what I was doing and not just writing things from memory, was huge. I know that others were faster, but for my own sanity I have to pretend that they were just coding from memory and not thinking about what they were doing. :)

We moved on to RailsLite, which was … interesting. These problems composed of partials are a nightmare to work through, though, because so much state that would be contained in a single file normally ends up instead fragmented across multiple files, and because I personally am not good at maintaining mass state like that, by the sixth partial I was lost. No part of the model itself was particularly difficult to grasp - we spent most of the day reading WEBrick documentation or Wikipedia articles and then writing one liners that didn't make much sense in isolation…

I can't say that this project was the best use of our time, but it was nice to gain some more understanding of how a HTTP request is handled in a dynamic manner. Writing a real Rails clone from spec/scratch might have been easier, albeit not a project for a single day. Oh well.

Tomorrow, we're on to Javascript, which has some weird behaviors that I'm looking forward to learning but not looking forward to fucking up on.