Purchased Rails Books

Ordered books:

• Agile Web Development with Rails 4 (eBook)

WDI Progress Update - Rails, REST, Shallow Nesting Routes, Helpers, Route Control, reInteractive Presentation

Challenges:

1. Extra credit homework to finish music website
2. Finally worked out hurdle of shallow nesting multiple routes!

Progress @ General Assembly (GA):

• Rails (Rendering Action/Template Alternate Layouts, Rails CRUD implementation of stateless Representational State Transfer REST for short-form Routing versus non-CRUD architecture i.e. SOAP, Rails Rake Routes Helpers, Shallow Nesting of Restful Routes, Class 'Before Actions', Private versus Public Actions, PageController Route catch-all for dynamic page errors, Static Pages, Destroy Controller, Video tags)
• Ruby (Faker gem)
• reInteractive Presentation on Ruby Communities by Mikel Lindsaar 
• Key tips shown in Reading List and Community Contribution sections below

Reading List (Monthly Min. Targets):

•  2 hrs - Ruby on Rails Guides
• 2 hrs - Ruby Programming Books Online 
• 1 hr - Ruby Memory Jogger - Alfred App + Dash (Docs & Snippets)
• 3 hrs - Ruby Koans
• 1 hr - Rails for Zombies 
• 1 hr - Rails Tutorials 
• 4 hrs - Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 (4th edition): The Pragmatic Programmer's Guide
• 4 hrs - Agile Web Development with Rails 4
• 2 hrs - Ruby Language Documentation 

Contributions to Developer Community (by end 2014)

• Work
• 2 hrs - Voluntarily develop website for The Slippery Gypseas by June 2013 
• 2 hrs - Volunteer at Ruby on Rails Development Hub and InstallFest 
• 15 mins - Presentation at Ruby on Rails Oceana @ROROSyd 
• 3 OFF - GitHub Repository Documentation and Code Review, and Pull Request with Corrections to Authors
• 2 hrs - Contribute to and Review Ruby or Rails Oceania Forum 
• 1 hr - Collaborate on Lets Pair  
• 1 hr - Collaborate on Pair Program with Me 

• Conferences
• 8 hrs - Participate at RubyConf Conference Australia

• Meet Ups
• 1 hr - Participate at Sydney Mobile Developers meetup
• 1 hr - Contribute to @ROROSyd IRC Forum 
• 1 hr - Participate at Port80 Sydney meetup 
• 1 hr - Participate at Geek Breakfast 
• 1 hr - Participate at SydJS meetup 
• 1 hr - Participate at RailsGirls Sydney meetup

 Future Contributions (beyond 2014)

• Mentor with @ROROSyd or similar 
• Attend a RailsCamp 

WDI Progress Update - Scaffold Migration in Rails

Challenges:

1. Homework!!! (et al)

Progress @ General Assembly (GA)

• Rails (Data Retention of Up/Down Migration, Verbose 'Say' Benchmarking, Rake specific versions, Multiple rollbacks, Rails Environment (Dev, Test, Production), Scaffold migration generation, Convention over Configuration, Rendering (View Actions, Arbitrary Files, Layout Overrides, Authorisations, Layout Scope Control, Absolute and Relative Paths), Refactoring block manipulation with Shared Partials and Collections, Flash Alerts and Notices, Rails Tooltips

Curiosity:

• DevOps Chef and Puppet Labs 

WDI Progress Update - Manual Migrations in Rails

Progress @ General Assembly (GA)

• Rails Key Definitions (based on personally reviewing unfamiliar keywords contained in all main Rails version 4.0.2 files/folders including Gemfile, and the Initialiser and Public folders that are generated after running 'new blog_app --database=postgresql', and summarising their definitions briefly in my own words and listing them in alphabetical order after a quick Google search, for fast-track Rails learning purposes). Accuracy in the definitions is not guaranteed (feedback welcomed!)
• ActiveRecord Database - Postgresql
• Action Mailer - emails from app using mailer classes/views
• Action Model - non-database (db) functionality of ActiveRecord plus validations in tableless models
• Action Pack - handles Controller and View layers in Rails
• Active Support - toolkit of Rails classes that are usable in Ruby environment
• Arel - simplifies SQL queries (it is an SQL AST manager)
• Atomic - accessor class for values and methods to control block updates (optionally with exceptions)
• BacktraceCleaner - includes filters and silencers to remove noisy lines of code and included in Initialisers directory
• bcrypt - password hashing algorithm
• builder - simplifies creating structured data in XML
• Capistrano - deploys Rails app to production server from Git 
• CoffeeScript - JS Coffee (assets/views)
• Deprecated - software features that should be avoided (as typically superceded) but remain for backward compatibility to allow developers to adjust to new standard
• Error 404 / 422 / 500 - web page not exist / change rejected (validation) / internal server error, - located in the Public folder 
• Erubis - template system of Embedded Ruby in text documents (i.e. HTML)
• ExecJS - enables JS code from Ruby
• hike - Ruby library for finding files in a set of paths
• i18n - internationalisation support that collects locale data
• Inflections - set of singularisation and pluralisation rules for Ruby/Rails apps, located in Initialisers folder
• jBuilder - template engine Domain Specific Language (DSL) for generating JSON response (API builder) 
• jQuery - JS library
• JSON - Javascript Object Notation (JSON) is a lightweight data interchange format 
• MiniTest - Ruby testing framework/facilities supporting TDD, BDD, mocking, and benchmarking (compared to RSpec which is a testing DSL)
• MultiJSON - common interface to multiple JSON libraries
• Parameters wrapper - wraps JSON files with Action Controller, located in Initialisers folder
• Polyglot - library that allows Ruby module to register a loader for file extension types and augments 'require' to find and load matching files
• Rack - modular and adaptable Ruby web server interface that wraps HTTP requests/responses across middleware in a single method call 
• Railtie - major components of Rails (i.e. Action Mailer, Action Controller, Action View, Action Record)
• robots - web crawlers/spiders (indexers), located in the Public folder
• Sass - Systactically Awesome Style Sheets (Sass) is a CSS3 extension (with nested rules, variables, mixins, selector inheritance, etc)
• SCSS - Sassy CSS (SCSS) is a CSS3 extension syntax based on and implemented with JS, with dynamic behaviour (i.e. variables, mixins, operations, functions) on either server or client-side
• SDoc - Ruby on Rails (ROR) API documentation
• Secret Token - verifies integrity of signed cookies, located in Initialisers folder
• sprockets - Rack-based asset packaging system that concatenates and serves JS, CoffeeScript, CSS, LESS, Sass, and SCSS languages
• TheRubyRacer - JS (call and manipulate from Ruby)
• Thor - scripting framework that replaces Rake, Sake, Rubigen (command line option parsing in Ruby)
• threadSafe - Rails app development with Ruby requests (controller, SQL, render, response) and optimal Ruby environment methods allowing switching threads (i.e. CPU in use, or CPU waiting idle) with sharing of states stored and locks, using one environment hash per request 
• tilt - generic interface to create multiple Ruby templates with file, line, and options specified
• Treetop - Ruby parsing and interpretation DSL based on Parsing Expression Grammars (PEGs) and analysing syntax. It defines methods on trees that it constructs automatically (Syntax-Oriented Programming)
• Turbolinks - JS & CSS (is faster, as when its compiling, it replaces only the body/head between page changes, and does not recompile JS/CSS, memory management recommended)
• TZinfo - Ruby Timezone library (i.e. with daylight savings, etc)
• Uglifier - Javascript (JS) asset compressor
• Unicorn - HTTP web server for Rack apps
• YAML - Yet Another Markup Language (YAML) format

• Rails (CRUD app setup, Controllers, Rake Routes, Database Migrations, Partials, Semantic URLs with Nested Routes)

Events:

• Planning to attend Sydney Mobile Developers meetup on 29th Jan at King St Brewhouse 6pm  - Unable to make it :(

Intro to Startup Entrepreneurship - Unit 1 Update

Progress @ Intro to Startup Entrepreneurship

• Unit 1 Summary
• Links:
• Brainstorming Guidelines, Stanford
• Books: 
• Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works, Edition 2, Ash Maurya
• Design Driven Innovation: Changing the Rules of Competition by Radically Innovating What Things Mean, Roberto Verganti
• Blue Ocean Strategy: How to Create Uncontested Market Space and Make Competition Irrelevant, W. Chan Kim, Renee Mauborgne

WDI Progress Update - Ruby, Sinatra, ActiveRecord, Sinatra, PostGreSQL, Rails MVC

Challenges:

1. Validations, SMTP
2. Homework bugs!!! 
3. Data Validation with ActiveRecord

Progress @ General Assembly (GA)

• Sublime Text 2 (Shift-CMD-R align multiple text lines, CMD+? to comment multiple lines)
• Ruby (Object Relationship Mapping ORM)
• Rails (Model View Controller MVC architecture, Deployment to Production using Heroku with GemFile, Scaffolding with database rake migration entire CRUD apps)
• Ruby Gems - (ActiveRecord, ActiveRecord Associations, HATM, Callbacks, PostGreSQL, Validations, Bundler for deployment)
• SQL (PostGres app, commands, tables, joins, foreign keys, CRUD)
• Tapestry Presentation on Front-End Development by Phil Reither

Progress @ Intro to Startup Entrepeneurship

• Unit 1 finished on 27th Jan !! Next steps: 
• Unit 1 - Lesson 7 Independent study activities, participate in online forum, create app based on learnings
• Unit 2 - UX, can't wait to start!!

Events:

• Attended meetup Startup Sydney on 23rd Jan @GA

Curiosity:

• Tank Stream Labs (startup community)
• Behavioural retargeting
• Gamification
• RescueTime
• StrongLoop
• Grails
• Universal design principles (accessibility): Haptics, Tactus, Web Content Accessibility Guidelines
• The World is Flat, Thomas Friedman
• Trends API
• CSS animations
• WebGL
• WebM format
• Paralax
• Caniuse.com (compatibility checker)
• Flinto.com (IOS Prototypes, Wireframing)
• Railcasts

Off Topic:

• Magna Carta

Sunday session

Challenges:

• D.School Design Thinking Bootcamp Bootleg 
• iPhone Application Development book (25% read)
• Plural site training
• IP legalities research 

Progress @ Intro to Startup Entrepeneurship

• Unit 1: Finding a Killer Startup Idea --> Completed Unit 1 Lessons 1-5 

Events:

• Attending Sydney on Rails Sunday Coder Club today 1-5pm

WDI Progress Update - Ruby, Sinatra, FileUtils, HTTParty, HTML5, CSS3

Challenges:

1. Ruby Koans
2. Pony gem (SMTP)
3. Error handling
4. GA Pre-work
5. Emmet.io
6. ice Tree
7. Wordpress
8. Heroku
9. Evernote
10. Meta programming (multmaker) 
11. Ruby Warrior
12. VIM commands
13. Stackoverflow
14. Github
15. Google Adsense
16. DevOps
17. Project Euler problems

Progress @ General Assembly (GA)

• Installfest
• Github Homebrew Package Manager 
• Sublime Text 2 (shortcuts, binding)
• Ruby (embedded Ruby files, Ruby API's, data types, conditionals, loops, arrays, hashes, methods, classes, inheritance, exceptions, objects, aliasing, interactive Ruby shell, pry debugging, enumerables, blocks, procs, lambdas, server-side scripts, file and IO classes, file utilities, file pointers, closures, caching, set theory, handling CSV files, handling JSON, HTTP verbs and errors, curl, Sinatra gem and reloader, cat, stash, preferential execution with File__ == $0)
• Ruby Gems - HTTParty, FileUtils, Sinatra app and reloader
• Ruby Modules - YahooFinance
• API's - OMDb
• HTML5 (form fields, responsive)
• CSS (stylesheet use options [import, inline, header], separation of concerns, cascading, descendants, selectors, blocks, properties, fonts, semantic classes, ID's, reset stylesheets, tags, Twitter Bootstrap, incompatibilities reset stylesheets, anchors, spans, blocks, inline, wildcards, link states, pseudo class selectors, positioning, DRY principle)
• Apple Macbook Pro usage

Progress @ Intro to Startup Entrepeneurship (Summer School by General Assembly and Google)

• Unit 1: Finding a Killer Startup Idea

Events:

• Signed up to attend Ruby Conference Australia (Feb 2014) 
• Attended meetup Ruby on Rails Oceana  (ROROSyd)

Future Wants:

• UX @ GA 
• UX tools 
• Volunteer at GA or Fishburners 
• Attend Sydney Business Angels, Sydney Tech meetups
• Attend a Rails Camp @railscamp_au 
• Continue attending Sydney Mobile Developers, and ROROSyd meetups 
• Continue Adobe Creative Suite usage
• Continue Lynda training
• Installfest Ubuntu
• Apply MBT learnings
• Books: Agile Web Development with Rails

Curiosity:

• Apiary, DEP, Audited/PaperTrail, Activerecord gems - (ROROSyd)
• Bundler, Travis CI - (ROROSyd)
• TDD/BDD
• Erlang VM, Elixir, Openresty, Heckle and RSpec
• Concurrency and immutability in languages

Purchased Ruby Books

Ordered books:

• Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 (4th edition) (eBook) 
• Sublime Text 2 - Sublime Text (Screencast)

WDI Commences - Team

General Assembly Web Development Immersive (WDI) Sydney team January 2014

Leaders:

• Riley Batchelor
• Jenny Jiang
• Taryn East
• Daniel Tsui
• Tiffany McHugh
• Tarun Mookhey

Students:

• Alberto Forni
• Eduard Fastovski
• Emily McCartney
• Federico Tagliabue
• Lauren Krueger
• Luke Mesiti
• Luke Schoen
• Marcus Hoile
• Nick Morgan
• Pranava Swaroop
• Sam Peters

Temporary Students:

• Adam Richards
• Daniel Georgatos