The Golden Square
Week 2 of the full-time course at Makers has come to and end. The first 2 weeks were spent working through their revamped curriculum which is named the Golden Square. It’s named the Golden Square because of the 4 fundamental skills Makers emphasises for good software development. These skills are Test Driven Development (TDD), Object Orientated Design (OOD), Debugging and Pair Programming.
We were given a repository on GitHub with all the information of each challenge, starting off with an introduction to setting up Rspec in our local directories to the basics of pair programming. Then it stepped up to testing single methods and classes to the entire design and test process for single and multiple classes.
The final challenge involved creating a Ruby program for a Takeaway. We were given a handful of user stories and were left to our own devices to implement showing the menu, pricing, adding food to orders and finally implementing the Twilio API to send a text message with delivery time.
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The big challenge for me, and a few others in my cohort, was getting a solid test driven approach for the third party API. After reading, it appears the usual approach of mocking wouldn’t work and a better way would be to make a class imitating the Twilio messaging aspect of the API. Unfortunately, this wasn’t something I could do, but a usual mocking test did send a text to my phone (which to me seems like it was calling the API rather than mocking). Still, once I learn more about API’s (REST ones particularly) I do intend to go back and give it a good go, if I’m not in too deep with other course commitments.
Another important lesson was the order of my environment variables. I added the auth token and account SID to my .zshrc file okay, but they wouldn’t be called. This cause me to lose almost an entire day figuring out the issue with frantic Google searching not turning up much. It wasn’t until later on that I tried re-ordering the variables so the Ruby path was the last environment variable. Magically this worked and solved all of my issues. The only saving grace is that I shared this struggle the following day with my morning peer-group (4 others from the cohort we have daily morning chats with), and they realised they did the same as me — so at least my pain wasn’t for nothing!
Both weeks flew by before I knew it, with some challenging struggles along the way. I found it to be incredibly fun and by Week 2, I had gotten a bit more comfortable with the Pair Programming roles as well as designing my own classes — a process I still need to work on, but I have no doubt that will come in time. If not, I have a code review booked in for just over 2 weeks time, which will be a 1 hour session with someone giving me a user story and watching my design and testing processes with feedback being received shortly afterwards.
I’m just about to start my third week, yet I’m very much enjoying my time with Makers. I feel like my knowledge has already drastically increased and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what Ruby can do. Next week is an introduction to web applications which will involve setting up a local server, using the Sinatra framework, getting some basic HTML/CSS pages out and introducing the MVC pattern. With the Jubilee weekend taking up the Thursday and Friday, it will be a short, but no doubt very intense few days. A challenge I am really looking forward to, even if a weekend break is much needed.
