ga-wdi-boston/wdi_1_ruby_hw_mbta_simplified — pull request #21 by sarahchristine913 (2014-06-11 07:37:50+00:00)
Title: Mele_Sarah Finished HW2

This was a TOUGH homework!!! I'm still not happy with where it is at this point (I have an ugly/broken staged set of changes that I refuse to commit) and I still have functionality that I had to remove in order to keep testing and to pinpoint errors to be changed throughout the program. With all this input, we truly need a LOT of conditions to build a robust/interactive program, which gets overwhelming and creates conditionalception in my head.

Conceptually, building the data structure melted my brain until I just started 'mapping'. Then I got the series of arrays that then became the values of a hash with keys as symbol versions of line colors.

The other basic components for operating, including the initial conditional came easier than I expected.

At first I tried creating my own methods to make my code more DRY, but it was slowing me down instead of making my life easier, so I decided to push it to the bottom of the priorities list. I'm sure Day 3 will improve my fluency with methods.

The biggest trouble I had here was when I didn't get the output I expected to get, and had to hunt down why to try and fix it (I still don't know why in my first commit putting something with a .downcase.to_sym method would output => : something and now refuses to actually show the colon). The more complex it gets, the harder it is to trace back to the roots to fix an issue that may have slipped through the cracks earlier, or been created by adding more functionality/complexity.

There is also more functionality that I would like to build out, but had to leave as comments to remind myself later.

I'm looking forward to using testing platforms to make this process more concise and productive, and obviously to being enlightened my the finished example to this problem.