Day 20

Sorry I didn’t get a blog in yesterday. I was struggling with setting up a dual boot of Ubuntu on my Windows 10 laptop. I ran into the problem of not having a large enough partition created and hit a snag. That said everything was installing fine once I got going. I had hoped to just run a persistent USB key and be able to take my dev environment wherever I want but I couldn’t figure that out. Needless to say I didn’t feel like writing. In addition, all I did was watch a few lectures last night so there was little to report on. I decided to setup the dual boot because after my intake conversation with Tracy I was convinced that I should take the time and get my environment setup. It took some time as I had less than 10GB free but by being creative, and using WinDirStat combined with Revo Uninstaller, I changed that to ~25GB. I decided to make a 15GB partition for Ubuntu 16.04.2 LTS but ended up running out of space. I freed up another 5GB today and add ed that to my Linux partition. Overall it was probably about an 8 hour process. I have yet to code in it but I’m writing this post in Atom on Ubuntu and I’ve cloned down my static site from GitHub using the terminal and I plan to push it as well. One of the biggest changes is that everything just works, in the sudo apt-get install kind of way. It’s nice. Also, Windows doesn’t want to go past a 1920x1080 resolution and Ubuntu will go 3200x1800 no problem. My eyes are still adjusting but I know I’ll be fine. Ubuntu was being a b*tch last night trying to install packages and stuff (programs hanging, etc…) but today it has worked great. I’m not sure if having some disk space has helped the OS out but my frustrations have disappeared today.

Today I started my Music Library CLI Project for Object Oriented Ruby! This thing was a beast with 71 tests that I needed to get passing. Luckily I could piece meal it together all based on code I already had written. There was a good amount that had to be written from scratch or completely changed to make the tests pass. However, I had a very strong base of knowledge to work with. I rarely had to Google or hit up Ruby Docs for answers today/tonight. I only hit one MAJOR snag. I couldn’t get a test to pass but everything looked right. I ran the CLI in my terminal and the output was perfect. After 90 minutes of trying different things I finally reached out to what is called a Learn Expert for help. 30 minutes later she was remoted in on my computer and ended up commenting out the test because her and a colleague had both agreed my code worked for the requirements even if it didn’t pass the tests. After that I was done in <25 minutes. It took me 7:57 to finish the project from start to finish and I probably could’ve shaved over an hour off of that. I haven’t refactored at all but the project is here if you’d like to see it.

Today was the kind of coding day I’d like to have every Saturday and Sunday. Maybe 1 more productive hour in there though. Tomorrow I’ll start a CLI Tic-Tac-Toe with AI project. I’m interested to see how AI is going to be tested and required. Mostly because I read this post on Medium about building an unbeatable Tic-Tac-Toe game not too long ago. I thought it would be fun to implement so I’ll see if it’s possible, maybe on the refactor.

Not much new to post about. Just been doing a lot of lecture watching and coding projects currently. Oh, I did learn about the unless method today from a Learn Expert when a piece of my code wouldn’t pass. I’m realizing sometimes nobody can explain why we need to use unless or if or while to make something work but that’s part of it. Some things are just at such a high level of knowing the language that the majority of people won’t know why.

Time spent today: 9:52
Time spent total: 92:48
Lessons completed today: 2 (and 2 yesterday)
Lessons completed total: 283