Among all the hat sewing, I’ve been steadily moving along with my technology stuff. I finally decided I was ready to tackle Rails (I’d been focussed on pure Ruby and also Sinatra and RSpec) – Rails the sub-chunk of Ruby that deals with the web stuff. It solves all the internet problems, if you only know how to use it. So I installed the rails gem and all the other gems one needed, followed a “Ruby on Rails in an hour” tutorial. Well, it took him an hour but it took me 3-4 days with the amount of dicking around one had to do when things went wrong, but I’ve finally made my first functional web app – a mini blog. You can post, delete, update, comment, delete comments, and it authenticates. It’s quite amazing how magic Rails is.
My next step which I will do today when I stop procrastinating is to start writing tests for it and have that framework up. I’m not sure how to start so yeah, I’m writing this blog post instead. 🙂
My goals, in case I’ve not been clear: I want to work in a place that does ruby, preferably as an automation engineer/dev.
I have chosen ruby above over technology for one reason: a partner who is a Ruby Dev and who can support me in this journey. I also like the ruby vibe. I’ve been watching RubyConf Melbourne videos on youtube and enjoying all of it.
I need to understand the technology in order to test it, so I am learning the technology. I’m not sure about the working as a dev bit yet – I still prefer to break things – and I can see a lot of potential in there for doing awesome things with testing, albeit a very programmatic way of testing compared to the ‘manual with lots of tools’ way I used to test.
I’ve always worked by understanding the system and then the details and formulating a plan. It’s just there is SO MUCH system (programming languages, frameworks, etc) to learn to become even slightly knowledgeable about it, and that’s what I’ve been doing. I am no longer ending each day in frustrated tears, which is what a lot of November – January was like. I’m moving on a lot from total ignoramus, I’m getting into the hang of figuring out how to figure things out.
.There is a massive shift in thinking from test to development and I’m still ruminating where I sit and what I want. I almost don’t like how little thought I have for doing testing when I do the dev, I can see why they don’t like it. It’s very hard to test your own designs. I’m trying to shift my brain into that mode today and it’s resisting. Really quite strange and utterly fascinating.
This is supposedly an art blog – here is some actual Art update; I had pretty much stalled on what I wanted to paint and do, in part, I was over what I had been doing. This is why I went into the sewing. It was something else to focus on , and fun, too.
The last art learning push I did was in egg tempera, and that was last year. So I finally decided I needed to move on and get some ideas and do some tutorials. So I got out my copies of “Australian Artist” and I’m doing a bunch of tutorials on water colour, to see how other people work with it and replicate what they do to see what tricks I can learn. Actually so far it’s been interesting, I have 5 different practice paintings on the go and they are all very different in approach and all different to MY approach.
I don’t really want to paint like other people but there is nothing like learning other than copying and the step by step stuff is really good.
Speaking of Australian Artist – I had an article published in the February 2019 edition! Which is huge actually and I should have mentioned it before. I submitted it some time last year and it was accepted. So nice to see my stuff in print! I wrote up an article on egg tempera. I spent considerable time editing this down to a readable article and I littered it with as much fun commentary as I could.
What else have I been doing? Well I try to exercise 6 times a week. I’ve been lax on the weights – needs to be min 3 sessions a week and I’m only really doing 1-2 and so I need to go back to doing this regularly. It wasn’t so bad when I had a personal trainer but I am living off savings at the moment and so that was a luxury that had to go. I’ve put on weight due to being a bit lax about this…and some of my clothes are too tight. I don’t mind being my size (16 Australian) but I need to fit my clothes!
You’d think with all the time off I’d have extra time to do things, but there is a phenomenon in unemployment where your ability to ‘do stuff’ drops right down. I’ve played no bass in months and I sometimes don’t seem to have time to do what I need to do. It’s totally bizarre and actually really nice – I’m learning the art of chilling out and gliding through life. Something I’ve never really done before.
I realised the glasses I got for my 21st are older than some people I know. I drank preservative free red wine from them at my birthday and this was a good thing.