Today a couple of us are gathering at Teavolve in Fells Point to pitch in a hand to the RailsBridge BugMash, a collective effort by folks scattered around the world to clean out the Rails Core Issue Tracker. Considering that we utilize open source so extensively, I feel it’s important that we give back to the community when possible.
Bryan Liles presented today on a new endeavor he calls #yerdoinitwrong. It is an evolution of the #standup meme for which he will be doing a series of podcasts with various experts who shed light on best practices that are not universally regarded as such.
Bryan gave us all a little taste of the array of topics: server administration, automated deployment, owning your shell, and mastering your editor among others. Best of all, he ran the session without a slideshow! As usual the topic spurred quite a bit of crowd participation (not to mention an onslaught of “you’re doing it wrong” jokes). Next meetup is Tuesday, October 13 where Mike Subelsky will be talking about Ruby for Startups.
We held our session in the Beehive this evening due to poor wireless connectivity in the conference room again. We had prepared by reviewing lectures 6 and 7 from the Stanford CS193P course and working on part 1 of the Presence application.
Two useful pieces of information that came about today:
Tonight I completed part 1 of the Presence program while Sinclair caught up on some of the past lectures. This assignment starts out with a walkthrough but then finishes fairly open-ended. I took the opportunity to build out a model class (though not instructed) to represent each Person in our list (I suspect this will come in handy for the next assignment). It was a good exercise in having to think about how to design the classes and data interaction. The PersonListViewController has a static UI layout, but I dynamically populate it with my Person objects. A Person object is passed into the child view (PersonViewController) via a custom constructor before we push the PersonViewController onto the NavigationController stack. I used a separate nib for the PersonView and populate its contents from the viewDidLoad() function.
All in all, I’m starting to get a pretty good feel for how to build useful apps.
Next week’s session will also take place in the Beehive as Mp3Car has reserved the conference room for a separate meeting. I will be out of town next week and consequently unable to make it. I’ve proposed that we don’t actually schedule any new lectures for next week and give folks an opportunity to catch up. In the meantime, you can check out my code on github.
