Stretching Ol' Blue Eyes on the Rack to get Slim

Sinatra
Heroku
Git
Foreman
Ruby
Bundler
Rack
Slim
Sass
CoffeeScript

Lots of buzzwords that I had heard of, some I vaguely knew what they were, a couple ( Ruby ) I had a more deeper understanding of.

But I'd never really understood how they all worked together and what they really meant.

Luckily for me, Jeff Nyman came along with a series of blog posts about installing all the required frameworks and utilities to get a web app up and running on Heroku.

I followed along, downloaded everything needed, typed in all the code ( not using Cut n Paste ) and learnt an awful lot.

I learnt that my dabblings in vi 20 years ago seem to have imprinted themselves and I was able to edit files without having to Google for the commands

I felt a great sense of achievement when I pushed to Heroku and was able to see my app up and running from there.

I was able to see first hand how things can go wrong when I started adding Javascript and missing brackets, semi-colons and incorrect brackets caused problems. The expected output was not happening but there was no error to tell me what had gone wrong ( yeh, I was not doing TDD, that's for my next learning adventure )

I still don't fully understand what I did - but I now have a very basic understanding and now have the ability to play around and see what breaks and what works and can dive deeper into each of the components to understand it more.

I also learned that following along and typing in rather than using copy n paste helps develop muscle and mind memory so by lesson 6 I was typing the commands without having to refer back to the earlier lessons and my file edits were quick and not cumbersome and error prone.

In a recent blog post, Alan Page talks about learning and practice and says:

you don’t really know the practice until you’ve tried it yourself 

Following along with the posts from Jeff gave me some practice, confidence - and now I have the framework in place to experiment and explore.

And it shows what a great resource the Internet is - thanks to Jeff for taking the time ( and it must have taken quite some time and effort ) to share his learnings.

Next up is tackling the Ruby on Rails tutorial and after the fun I had remembering and using vi then I'll go off and see if I can learn me some vim.