This is blog post number 5 about my journey to becoming a software engineer.
BLOC introduced me to a very effective tool to improve my coding skills. As always, if you want to improve in a field, you have to practice. Did you learn how to write without writing? Certainly not. Similarly, one cannot learn how to code without coding. Luckily, very smart and gracious people have come up with fun and creative ways for everyone to practice their coding skills. I knew exercism.io, but Codewars was new to me. I really like Codewars. It’s a learning platform for coders of all levels that provides a large list of coding problems, katas, for everyone to solve. Codewars is very educational since it lets you compare your solutions to other warriors’ solutions. Moreover, its users can vote both for Best Practice Solutions and very Clever Solutions. Codewars covers plenty of different programming languages and is fun to use. What are you waiting for? Use this referral link and help me earn extra honor and gain new allies!
As a matter of fact, one of the katas pushed me to learn regular expressions, a skill that I avoided so far. A regular expression is a sequence of characters that define a search pattern that finds matches to that pattern in texts. Here is part of the kata’s description:
Write a function that takes a string and turns any and all words within that string of length 4 or greater into an abbreviation following the same rules.
All words within a string of length 4? Very easy using regex:
/\w{4,}/
With this rather simple regex I was able to solve my kata.
But let’s move on to more fun topics: Ruby on Rails. My next larger project requires me to build Bloccit. Just like Reddit, Bloccit will be an app where people can post, vote on, share and save links and comments. I am excited to get to build these features, but before we can get to it we need to learn how to create new rails apps from scratch and deploy them to Heroku. Heroku is a so called platform as a service (PaaS) that allows developers to focus on building apps and a little less on server requirements.
This is all review for me since I built my first rails app at Miami University in 2012. However, this tutorial taught me how to search for a specific process based on the port it is exposed to.
lsof -i :3000
If that doesn’t make any sense to you – no worries, you’ll learn it soon.
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