What others have labored hard for…
By: Thomas Ochman
Tags: Learning To Code, Programming, Education, Ruby on Rails, Startup

At the end of the day, after all the troubles and tribulations, we had a great graduation ceremony at Craft Academy. Thank you faraznaeem and Sophie Sjöberg for organizing and making this happen. And special thanks to Magnús for the improvised speech to… who was it?

This is fucking awesome! 3 months into their journey, they build stuff. They actually build stuff!

The presentation of FoodHub went really well. I really need to emphasize an important point — the students we just graduated managed to build a fully featured application in a total of 4 weeks of designing and coding. (this fact shows how powerful Ruby on Rails is) They also had NO PRIOR experience of building web applications before they joined Craft Academy (this fact shows how much a team can achieve if you push them outside the box and put them through a training program that focus on Just In Time Learning) What can I say other than: Thank you DHH and the rest of all the 5026 people that has contributed to Rails over the years.

Without the idea of Conceptual Compression that seem to guide the team behind Rails (but also the “Convention over Configuration” doctrine)— the work my students did on this project would not be possible (and its NOT just about SQL vs Active Record). They managed to build an application packed with interesting features that include (in no particular order):



- Creating and forking of recipes (Yay! Made possible by ActiveRecord — no SQL!)

- User authentication using email/password and OAuth (Facebook)

- Image storage in the cloud (ActiveStorage and Amazon Web Services S3 storage)

- Push notifications using Websockets (ActionCable)

- A rating and commenting system (.. more Active Record and Unobtrusive JavaScript)

- A Recipe Book generator (create and download a custom recipe book in pdf format thx to the Pawn gem)

- Search functionality (using Elasticsearch)

Full disclosure, the deployed app on Heroku is still not doing what we want it do do. We can generate the pdf with images in development, but it fails in production. Will have to investigate this further. If you try to take the app for a spinn, you will encounter an error if you try to generate a Recipe Book…

Moving on… I traveled back to Gothenburg on Sunday and spend most of my afternoon fixing the Rails weeks materials and polishing the Cybersecurity Bootcamp. “Cybersecurity — it is not a matter of “if” but “when” your business will come under attack.”

I created 3 new courses on our LMS (another 3 will be coming up shortly) regarding the Cybersecurity track. The idea is that we take one content and deliver it both as separate courses through the LMS but also as av Bootcamp. If we are smart about this, we might be able to combine those students in the same cohorts ( a kind of “come-and-learn” groups mixed with dedicated, full-time bootcamp learners).

See https://class.craftacademy.co/courses/course-v1:CraftAcademy+CSS-01+2019-01/about and follow the links to the other course if you want to read more about each part.

I also took a closer look at the Discovery service of the LSM and all the various settings we can set up there…) and the settings for Prerequisite courses that are currently NOT enabled and I would need Magnus to take a look at this.

Today

- Start the Legacy code Challenge with the Juniors

- Write blog posts about graduation

- Eat lunch with Per-Erik (Cybersecurity)

- Admin work

- Follow up with Raoul

Blockers

None ATM. Well, the usual stuff. I’m still striving to achieve a balance in Work vs Life (is that even a relevant way to put it?).

Quote of the day

My pick:

“The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step.” Lao Tzu

A pick from faraznaeem that I like so much (especially in the context in “Convention over Configuration” paradigm).