Malandr1na

Rails Developer at thoughtbot Dev Bootcamp alum

[malandr1na-blog]

Gem mining

Hitch makes it easy to make joint commits when you're pairing, like when my coworker and I were refactoring some tests the other day.

Shoulda is a thoughtbot gem that lets you write simpler and more readable Rspec tests for your Rails applications.

In addition to the indispensable thoughtbot style guide, Cane (by Square) is great tool for checking and ensuring code quality.

[malandr1na-blog]

Getting my Padawan learning on at thoughtbot

As I earnestly explained to every company that interviewed me in December, my highest priority coming out of Dev Bootcamp was finding a work environment where my continued learning would be supported.

So what am I doing now?

For the next three months I’ll be learning the Ways of the Developer from the thoughtbot Rails team as an apprentice. I’m honored and excited to be part of thoughtbot's innovative apprentice.io program. I’m even more excited to be able to make Jedi analogies every time I talk about work.

What I learned, Week One

1. Interactive rebasing isn’t as scary as it sounds.

It was tempting to feel intimidated by a new, seemingly complicated protocol for collaborating on code projects, especially as someone who's generally new to revision control systems. But thanks to my mentor and thoughtbot’s protocol guide, I'm already loads more comfortable using Git.

2. Class methods (can) resist refactoring.

3. accepts_nested_attributes_for :blah

According to the ActiveRecord docs, it "defines an attribute writer for the specified association". This means that you'd be able to set the value of :blah_attributes by passing it in through the params hash.

[malandr1na-blog]

gem install word_reference

Yesterday sandbochs and I released our gem for the WordReference.com API into the wild. So exciting!

You can check out our code and documentation here: https://github.com/malandrina/word_reference

[malandr1na-blog]

Creating a Ruby interface for an online dictionary

I pretty much think that language is the most fun thing ever. If you know me, you know that I love games like Bananagrams and live for the Financial Times weekend crossword. (And you know that I never actually finish it, because it’s really hard.)

Some months ago I discovered that one of my favorite websites, the translation dictionary WordReference, has an API. During Ruby group project week at Dev Bootcamp I got to spend some time playing with the Twitter gem and was inspired to create something similar for WordReference.

Last week my fellow Dbc student sandbochs and I worked together to create a Ruby wrapper for the WordReference API. Our goal is to get some feedback from experienced developers within the next few days, and then release it as a gem for anyone to use.

So what does it do?

We’ve made it easy for your Ruby application to query the WordReference API and manipulate the results of the query. If you take a look at the API documentation, you’ll see that a query to the JSON API returns a JSON object which, when parsed, turns into a big complicated hash.

Our gem organizes and breaks this big complicated hash into digestible chunks with sensible names. It also makes it easy to correctly configure your queries with your WordReference API key.

Et voilà

So now you can spend more time designing your awesome multilingual/translating/word game app, and less time writing lines of code that will make you sad, e.g.

results['PrincipalTranslations']['term0'].first.values['OriginalTerm']['POS'] == 'n'

You should be able to gem install this thing on Tuesday or Wednesday. Exciting!