Red, Green, Refactor! Week 2 Update

Red, Green, and Refactor – three words that form the basis of test-driven development were the last thing I learned from Ruby on Rails tutorial this week. This was from Chapter 3 – which was a lot more complicated than my first lesson (excluding the very first chapter about installation of Ruby and Rails).

But, that was almost a week ago. In terms of productivity past that point, I didn’t get to do much work with Rails. I think after seeing how this week went, I can see how programs like Dev Bootcamp would work because if you get 1) entire 9 weeks dedicated nothing but programming, you MUST improve, and 2) dedicated mentoring and projects to challenge your thinking and programming skills.

Still, it’s not like I didn’t do anything related to programming. I spent quite a bit of time researching about Javascript, and overall differences between web designer and web developer. This infographic (while a bit offensive to women I think) is a good review of the differences between two jobs. Now, from the surface, the difference may be obvious to 4th graders – after all, one is for designer while another is for developer.

But, really, I have come to conclusion that a lot of skilled web developers have the skills of web designers, so the line that separates two is very blurry. While I *cannot* say the same for the reverse since many web designers are rather equipped with graphic design skills instead (of course, this does NOT mean web designers cannot become web developers – it simply means graphic design skills are more common than server-side languages for web designers ), web developers who specialize in PHP, Ruby, or other server-side languages should be familiar with Javascript (I’m not including HTML and CSS since they are fairly straightforward even to myself).

So, a lot of my times was spent on reading about Javascript, how to possibly learn it quickly, and improve my skills with HTML and CSS. In a way, I was goofing around a bit from my journey on Ruby on Rails, and I do admit about doing that. I think, however, that basic skills for web design are useful, and I’ve come across few books on Amazon about Android developments with HTML, CSS, and Javascript as well (those for web app though; native app still needs Android SDK). There are so much there to know – and while I am not trying to know everything (that’s impossible for ANYTHING in the world), I find that the more I know about different languages, the better programming makes sense. For one, I find Javascript to be somewhat similar to Java and Python but for different reasons.

So, I will go back to Ruby on Rails now but continue to set aside this time to learn Javascript as well. Whether I will learn Javascript with HTML/CSS or just Javascript, I’m not sure. And as far as TDD is concerned with Ruby on Rails, I think it’s slightly overwhelming, so I had to download few new productivity apps to boost my time management and keep my pace slow to make sure I understand everything that Michael Hartl will provide in the book.

Anyways, for productivity, I used to previously own Wunderlist 2 (available across most platforms), but found it not do the job for me (a great app nevertheless). Now, I chose to use 30/30 and Do It Tomorrow to better manage my time. Let’s see how this change will help for Week 3!

Note: The first image was done with Photoshop Touch to give a feel of confetti art. The original photo was very good too, but I wanted to give a slightly different feel. The second image was about vending machine for Apple products – but I again used Photoshop Touch to do color inversion and changed the brightness of the light for additional contrasts.

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