State of the Mission: Sunday, 11th December 2016

Week 50 of 2016

Mission DevOps

Work Completed

I started Learn Ruby the Hard Way, got up to Chapter 40, and have been posting about my learning along the way.

Plans for Next Week

Focusing on Learn Ruby the Hard Way is proving as beneficial as I had hoped, and I have every reason to complete it by the end of Week 51 of 2016.  Thereafter, my focus will be on PROJECTS, i.e. something to show for all my efforts.

1. Transferring my Pastebin to Gist using APIs.
2. The Toy Robot Challenge
3. Advent of Code
4. Starting my job research web scraper and analysis tool.

There is every reason for me to get started on substantive projects that I can put on Github and then direct all and sundry to.  Owing to the paucity of code in my Github, I have been reticent to contact potential recruiters and apply for jobs, but come the last of December, business shutting down notwithstanding, I should have every reason to send out missives and apply online. 

Special Project

My super-special-but-perhaps-not-so-top-secret project is ticking along on schedule.  I have a few more weeks to go, so that's all I've got to say about it for now.

The Odessia

Not much progress on the Odessia this week, but my schedule will permit a lot more creative writing time soon.

Personal Matters

Just the usual washing, cleaning, tidying for the most part.  I have been in touch with uncle, who has been unwell, and attended to the usual bits and pieces that crop up.  One day, when I'm very wealthy and successful, I will have a secretary to handle these matters.

State of the Mission: Friday, 9th December 2016

At some point I'd like to build my own blogging tool, or help to improve an open source one, but in the meantime Blogger gives me what I need and does a good job of formatting the posts for mobile devices as well.  In the long term I'd like to become independent of Google's services -- it's heading in the same, invasive, politicised direction as Facebook and Apple, so it's important but not urgent yet.

My first task is to transfer the contents of my Pastebin to Gist.

My first major project is a career research tool composed of a web scraper and an analyser.  It'll start by parsing job ads for key words, and ultimately seek out a variety of data points to give a complete overview of what professions are in demand, what skills are up-and-coming in said professions, and what the prospects of someone starting out are.  It can be done in various languages -- Python comes to mind -- but I think Ruby and Rails will give me everything I need.  Maybe some JavaScript too.

I'm up to Chapter 38 of Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and find it to be one of the best resources I've come across.  In fact, I've suspended my Code Academy account until I've got everything I can from Learn Ruby the Hard Way, it's really as good as that.

On Monday, I had a very encouraging catch-up with a local technical recruiter, and he laid out the Three Ps that in his experience are the key ingredients to success: Passion, presence, and projects.

As you can see, I'm putting everything to do with this mission on my blog, which is a big part of answering the question: What do I have to show for my efforts?

I've been thinking, tinkering, reading, deliberating, and pondering since July, and the more good stuff I have to show for my efforts, the better my chances.  As soon as practicable, I want that to be my Github repository, but in the meantime it's my blog.

From Pastebin to Gist: Not So Fast!

I published my first paste on Pastebin five years ago (at the time of writing), and Pastebin has been very good to me ever since, but it's time to migrate my data to Gist on Github.

I looked around for an automated migration solution, but couldn't find any.

Then I thought about copying and pasting all my pastes, but that's stupid, laborious work, and no self-respecting programmer would do something so repetitious.

So what's the clever solution?

The following headers are the skeleton of my plan.  I will update this post as I progress.

Part One: Get the raw pastes from Pastebin

Pastebin API

Pastebin has a scraping API and a developer's API which costs a lifetime membership.  At the time of writing there is a big discount on lifetime membership, so I bit the bullet and got it.  The practice it gives me will be more than a decent ROI.

Construct the Query, in Ruby

All the sample scripts are given in PHP, but there must be a way to do it in Ruby, or failing that, in JavaScript.

Execute the Query

Part Two: Upload the raw pastes as separate Gists

Github API

Construct the Script, in Ruby 

Execute the Script