Coursera Rails Week 1 Notes
I wrote earlier about how I am taking a series on Rails Development with Coursera. Below are some of my notes from the course:
Installing Rails on OS X
I had RVM installed in the past, but my experience with CircleCI, conversations with eric, and the instructions in the course told me to use something else. So I blew away RVM and replaced it with rbenv. When it came time to install rails, I was getting an error around nokogiriwhich is strikingly similar to a lot of the issues that we see when updating OS X images. I am not 100% sure what the root cause of this error is, but the fix is to run the following commandxcode-select --install
this will magically fix everything and rails will install. Apparently this has something to do with when you install newer versions of Xcode, some underlying libraries become sad and running that command fixes it. Yay Apple.
Handy Bash Profile
During the installation videos the instructor shows how to work with bash profile. I stole a couple things from his profile that he did not cover that would have saved me hours over the course of my life so far.- Make the prompt show less info My current bash prompt is super long because my laptop name is
Levs-MacBook-Pro-2:
, if you set the following variable it will just show you your username:# Change the way Prompt Shows Up export PS1="\n[\u \W]$ "
- Make aliases for
ls and ls -al
These aliases are super handy. The first one shows you which files are directories, symbolic links, or regular files in color. The second one allows you to list all the details about files by simply typingll
instead ofls -al'
.# Aliases alias ls='ls -G' alias ll='ls -al'
Sublime Text Tips and Tricks
Like many MOOCs these days, this course recommends using Sublime Text. I don't disagree, its a great editor. I bought a license two years ago but have not used it in quite some time. I like it because its super lightweight, has a relatively small learning curve, and is fast. This is especially evident when working with large text files that would cause the latest stream of Electron based editors (like Atom, VS Code, Light Table) to beachball or crash. I decided to give it another shot and follow along in this course. I learned a couple of things I did not know.- If you double click on a search result it will take you to the file, holy crap that would have saved me a ton of time in the past.
- Go to Anything with
Command + P
, I have heard about this but never used it. Wow. Just Wow.
Git
This course had a great overview of Git including a nice historical overview and differences between git (Distributed System) and Centralized Systems like CVS and Subversion. This course also allowed me to discover that Pro Git is available for free as an ebook. This is an excellent resource and I am so grateful that Scott Chacon and Ben Straub released the eBook under a CC license.GitHub
My mind has been blown. If you go to any GitHub repo and type in "T" it starts a fuzzy search of that repo. I have been using GitHub for three years and did not know about this feature. This just goes to show you, that even if you are an "expert" at something, it can be really valuable to step back into the shoes of a beginner. I did not expect to learn much from this first module, but I was sorely mistaken.Thank you for reading! Share your thoughts with me on mastodon or via email.
Check out some more stuff to read down below.
Most popular posts this month
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- SQLite DB Migrations with PRAGMA user_version
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Recent Favorite Blog Posts
This is a collection of the last 8 posts that I bookmarked.
- Serendipity from Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
- Andrea Veri: GNOME Infrastructure migration to AWS from Planet GNOME
- A Whale of a Time from https://popagandhi.com/
- Pluralistic: You should be using an RSS reader (16 Oct 2024) from Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
- Sahil Dhiman: 25, A Quarter of a Century Later from Planet Debian
- Reflections on Palantir from Nabeel S. Qureshi
- Reading Old Posts from Kev Quirk
- Capture less than you create from David Heinemeier Hansson
Articles from blogs I follow around the net
Script Doctoring
I’ve been having a number of communications problems in my interactions with my doctors at Kaiser lately, and it’s becoming one of those things where the burden and onus entirely is placed upon me to sort out, and that’s exhausting for the actually autist…
via Bix Dot Blog October 22, 2024Blockchain company Forte acquires games studios, demands secrecy, shuts them down
Sometime in 2023, blockchain firm Forte acquired game studios Phoenix Labs and Rumble Games. However, it would be a year before this came to light, because according to a report from Game Developer, Forte demanded secrecy from employ…
via Web3 is Going Just Great October 22, 2024Initial explorations of Anthropic's new Computer Use capability
Two big announcements from Anthropic today: a new Claude 3.5 Sonnet model and a new API mode that they are calling computer use. (They also pre-announced Haiku 3.5, but that's not available yet so I'm ignoring it until I can try it out myself.) Comp…
via Simon Willison's Weblog: Entries October 22, 2024Generated by openring