kates . gasis . net

As much as I wanted to believe, I'm no smarter than anyone else. The technical interview result confirmed that.

I don't know if I'm dumb or I just don't have that critical thinking most successful programmers get. First, I lack the formal CS degree. I learned to program by using the "Get Things Done" approach. Now, I'm paying the price.

The experience made me think hard of getting a formal CS degree. I'm free during saturdays. But then saturdays is reserved for fun stuffs. Not that schooling isn't fun. I've been in school for various discipline for 27 years of my life and I'm currently using something for work I didn't learn from school.

Oh well..

I received an email earlier today from a company where I applied last week. I just passed their first interview process where I was tasked to write codes and solve problems under time constraints. Most of it was algorithmic problems. I was never good at algorithm not being an engineering or a computer science graduate. But I was fascinated by good algorithms I find in books.

I used to code in C using Turbo C for my earliest pet projects. It's only now that I realized how important it is to be able to code with it. Yeah, I basically taught myself C in those days telling myself that I would one day be asked to create a program without high level libraries. I was thinking about survival in the world of computers without helper tools we have today.

Apparently, those Snake game demo I created with C didn't go to waste. I might not have to use pointers again with my current set of tools but it's nice to know how they worked and what data structures are best in a specific situations.

By the way, I didn't use C to solve the interview problems. I used (what else?) PHP. More than one year of coding in PHP non-stop makes me feel at home with it and focus on solving the problem than reading them manuals while wrestling with the task.

So it's good news to me. I'm scheduled to have another interview either tomorrow or on friday. Wish me luck.

I'm currently employed but I'm having an interview tomorrow. It's a Python gig. Right now, I would love to code in anything other than PHP. My problem is I was using PHP daily that it became almost natural for me to code in. My Python skills is a bit tarnished of months (or years) of being in unused state.

I heard the company I am applying in give out tough interview tests. The good thing about it was I get to choose the language to use to solve the problems. Since the company is a Python shop, it would be really nice to use Python to answer the questions.

Damn, I need a new job. I'm just plain bored with my current one.

I need to have an application specific configuration variables like application name. I was writing classes in my application.rb.

class AppConfig
    APP_NAME = "My APP"
end

And then use it anywhere like

AppConfig::APP_NAME

Today, I found out a much better way to do it. This time, I created /config/config.yml and put

app_name: My APP

In the /config/environment.rb, I added:

require 'ostruct'
require 'yaml'

::AppConfig = OpenStruct.new(YAML.load_file("#{RAILS_ROOT}/config/config.yml"))

I can now use AppConfig.app_name anywhere.

One book , albeit PDF, that I never regretted buying was Agile Web Development with Rails by Dave Thomas. Without it, I would've not known how easy it is to create and recreate the database schema during development. The schema versioning is a killer feature.

The only time a developer ever touch a DB tool is when he creates a database for a project. He can then use db:migrate to add/edit/delete his tables. Not sure about your table structure? Don't worry you can change that later. I found myself reverting to VERSION=0 all the time until I'm pretty comfortable with the table structures.

Now that I have the big rocks in place, I need to fill in the small places with pebbles. I just bought a PDF version of Agile Web Development with Rails 2nd Ed from the Pragmatic Programmers series.

I had just finish reading and doing the tutorial for RESTful rails. Although, the concept was clear to me, due to being a newbie, there are somethings that bothers me with the approach. Like how would a simple login/logout be coded. I believe everything will be clearer upon further immersion to Rails.

Back to the book, I am a bit of a hurry to learn that I can't wait for the book to arrive if I order one. It would take not less than a month for it to arrive where I live. And being in a relatively poor country, the PDF version is way, way, cheaper. I have intended to print a copy, though.

Maybe in a few days.

I'm back from my Camping microframework trip. I'm into Rails again and have managed to start working on a long delayed rewrite of the app for mom's business. That app was written in Java 5 years ago.

Learning the Rails framework is easy if you have already a thorough understanding of what a webapp is and the MVC pattern is uses. Coding for a webapp is very different from coding a desktop app.

After learning the Rails framework, comes the hard part, figuring out how to solve you domain problems. I've read somewhere that this what separates coders from developers. Developers knows how to look at the big picture. I agree. There are people who are great coders. They know their way in and out of the language they use but they lack the ability to take down a huge task facing them. I'm not a very good coder. I can't live without my references and APIs but I can break large tasks to smaller ones and build them on by one.

Ok. About this current personal project. I found out that there are times that you have to use dirty coding techniques to achieve your goal. In my case, I was going to update a form with lots of models in it. I know there are more elegant ways to update them all in one go but for now my hack works. I updated the models one by one based on their ids, the way we do it in PHP.

I wonder how will Rails perform with huge tables. Our application in PHP is having a hiccup with close to 2 million rows of data. Trying to fetch 1,000 rows in 7-10 colums of data eats 16MB of memory. Unfortunately, I wont' be able to test the same data with my Rails installation without getting fired.

Until next time.

I went camping for a few days. While learning Ruby, I thought, I'm better off using something that doesn't involve too many helpers. I have a feeling that Rails is spoon-feeding me. In a good way, that is. But then there's a need to learn Ruby.

Enter Camping. Camping, according to Why's, of the Why's Poignant Guide to Ruby book fame and Camping creator, is a Microframework.

I was amaze to see fully functional app coded with MVC pattern in just one file. That's microframework. After three days of camping with Ruby, I already miss the closures when I get back to work with PHP this morning.

Forgive me if I'm overly ecstatic. I guess this is how other Ruby and Rails newbie feels. Now, back to to my Rails lessons.

I just wrote my staple starter app, the Phonebook, in Rails without using scaffolding. I always write a phonebook app whenever I learn new programming language or framework so it follows that I would be doing the same again with Rails.

Almost all tutorials for Rails newbie uses scaffolding. I used script/generate scaffold method. It’s magically impressive. But programmers being programmers, there is a pressing desire to understand what actually happened or how to that manually. Adding to that, experienced Rails developers are shunning away from scaffolding for more complex task.

Being familiar with MVC frameworks and has grasped the basics of Ruby language helped a lot but developing with Rails is easier and faster indeed.

I finally got this Rails-based blog engine to install in hostmonster. I just spent the good latter part of my day trying to figure out why mephisto won’t install. The edge version from the SVN won’t but the stable version went well without any problem. It was over in less than 5 minutes. Just as fast as wordpress only this time ssh access is absolutely necessary.

On another subdomain, my other rails project is taking shape. A sort of a test project to teach me Ruby and Rails. I am on my third week with Ruby and Rails. Learning them could’ve been faster if not for our heavy development using PHP.