100 Days of Code: A Winter Tradition, Ruby Edition
October 30, 2023
I finally figured winter out.
The daylight's the shortest, the nights are long and cold. When going out in the dead of winter is more than miserable, it's best to have a hobby that can be done at home. I had to learn this very quickly in New York when I ended up having to spend the end of winter and beginning of spring all cooped up in my apartment during the Covid-19 lockdown--and thus began my winter tradition of learning to code a new language and getting on it for 100 days straight.
This time, I'm learning Ruby and hopefully can graduate into Ruby on Rails midway. The plan is to not have a plan. I will not set up goals this time around so it's not so stressful.
As of October 30, I'm currently on Day 3 of 100. This means I will finish this challenge by February 4, 2024.
First impressions and thoughts on Ruby
- It's simple and very human-readable
- Many things make sense like .chomp. But some also do not. Like who the heck thought of the .upcase and .downcase method names?
- I'm enjoying taking notes on syntax and I may eventually publish as a guide
- Currently not using an IDE and just using Sublime and Terminal (very backend and basic for now) and it's considerably light on memory. Once I get to Rails, I'll have to do an update on performance because my Macbook, while good enough, didn't really like PyCharm so much
- It's amazing how even when coding is not my day job anymore, I'm able to process what I want to do and get to a solution
- I said I was dedicating 1 hour per day on this, but always end up exceeding the time
I have some fun things I want to do that I will keep in my head for now. I'm excited! This makes me so excited.
Today, I made a quick number guessing game that smack talks the user when they don't follow instructions. It's akin to what I would write for machine problems back in University. Nothing sophisticated, but it made Marc laugh.
Having a winter season suits my personality since I don't really like interacting with people if I can help it. So it's plus points towards a hobby when people I actually like find the fruits of my 'labour' useful and/or funny.
What is your winter tradition?
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