Getting the Hang of Rakefile!

There seems to be an error every step of the way, but, inch by inch, I'm getting there.

User Testing Update

I've had to hit the books again to improve my understanding of variables, classes, and methods.

I've been re-writing my text adventure game so that every aspect of it is tested by the Rakefile.  This means that I have had to extrapolate the logic of the enter() method in each class, so that a test can be written for it.

The most interesting parts of the game involve somewhat complex conditionals, written as case conditionals, and for some reason it took me a while to understand how to pass on a variable to the method containing a case conditional.  Now that I look at it again, it's very simple, but c'est la vie.

Anyway, the re-written game is nearing completion and the latest code is up on Github.

Progress Chart With A Twist (Or Pattern!)

My beloved helped me to create a handy stencil for my white board, with which I make a chart like this:

The chart works like this:
Black = Study, i.e reading about Ruby, learning the concepts.
Green = Code, i.e. working on code that goes to Github.
Blue = Blogging.
Red = Job search, i.e. applying for jobs, calling recruiters, etc.

This is literally a progress chart, in the sense that it represents my progress, rather than how much of a goal I have completed.

The twist of setting up the 10x10 table with a repeating pattern of four colours, instead of a neater set of coloured columns, is that gaps are unsightly.  Each of these four aspects of my mission is equally important, and the discomfort of seeing an uneven distribution of filled cells induces me to turn my attention to activities I have been neglecting.

To be honest, I do not enjoy looking for work, and would much rather be busy coding and studying.  Blogging isn't too bad, but coding is more fun.

Nevertheless, until I get my first gig, my job is looking for work, and so the red cells have to be filled in first.

So far, so good.

Ruby Hack Night Review (2017-01-11)

The first Melbourne Ruby Hack Night, hosted by REA Group, was every bit as good as I had hoped.

Check out Ruby and Rails Melbourne on Meetup.

It was my first proper hacking event since my Linux Victoria days, and it was exciting to sit in a room full of people who really enjoy their code.  The atmosphere at the event was the right mix of serious keyboard tapping and light-hearted conversation, and the venue is really quite comfortable.

We started at 18:00 and worked each of us fairly quietly for about an hour, until the pizzas were delivered.  We downed tools and enjoyed some good food and friendly conversation.  After doing the schmoozing rounds, we drifted back to our computers, and the evening passed by pleasurably and productively until the end of the evening at 21:00.

I was especially pleased to get some much needed help with my test automation, and my vastly improved code will be ready for a push to Github tomorrow, once I've tidied up some loose ends.

(Update: The next version of the code I was working is available)

Many thanks to the organisers and I'm looking forward to the next Melbourne Ruby Hack Night.

The Story of My Engagement

NOTE: My fiancée wishes to stay out of the online limelight, and neither her real name nor her image shall appear in this or future posts.

I met my beloved at a libertarian meet-up in Melbourne in early 2015.  We chatted all night and befriended each other on Facebook, but didn't exchange messages for about a week or two thereafter.  At the time I was reading 'Paradise Lost' by John Milton and messaged her to share an especially good passage.  This led to our first date: at the Melbourne City Public Library, where we read from 'Paradise Lost' and some other poetry together -- Blake and Shakespeare, if I recall --, and then spent the rest of the evening at the Oriental Tea House.

Our courtship was not without difficulty, for who is not fallible?, but I believe we fell in love immediately and gradually came to realise that a great shift in our lives had come to pass.


On my birthday, 20th of May 2015, my beloved gave to me a beautiful hard-cover journal featuring etchings of William Blake's poetry.  In truth, the journal was too fine for me to fill with scrawls of incomplete thoughts, and I put it away until such time as I had something worthwhile to write in it.

On the birthday of my beloved last year, the seventh of January 2016, I finally realised what I wanted to write in the journal: a declaration of love and a proposal of marriage.  My first entry was on the twentieth of May 2016, and over the next fifty weeks, I gradually filled the journal with logs, love letters, transcriptions of poetry, original poems, and a short story.  I fell behind schedule during the winter and had to recalculate the number of pages per day to fill in order to have the journal ready by the seventh of January 2017.

In December of 2016 I ordered an engagement ring composed of a silver band and a sparkling emerald, which turned out to be the wrong size, and had a nervous wait for it to be resized by a local jeweller.
On the fifth of January, I had the ring.
On the sixth of January, the journal was complete.

My final Kanban ticket before the big day, now complete.

After eleven-dozen-and-ten pages of writing from the heart, the last two pages were my final declaration of love in French, Hebrew, Lithuanian, and English; and my proposal of marriage in all four languages.

The declaration of love:

Oui, mon amour, je vois bien l'essentiel avec le coeur: tu m'as trouvé et apprivoisé (bien que je suis encore un animal sauvage); tu es ma rose et je suis pour toujours responsable de toi.

כן, אהובתי, רואה אני היטב בלבי את הדבר החשוב באמת: מצאת אותי ואילפת אותי (אומנם נשאר אני חיית פרא): את השושנה שלי וערב אני לשלומתך לנצח.

Jo, mano meilé, aš svarbiausią dalyką matau: tu mane radai ir prisijaukinau (nors aš vis dar laukinis šveris esu); tu mano rože esi ir aš atsikingas amžinai už tave.

Yes, my love, I see the essential with my heart: thou didst find me and tame me (although I remain a savage beast at heart!); thou art my rose and I am forever responsible for thee.

And finally, the proposal of marriage:

[], ma chׂérie, mon miracle, je t'aimerai pour toujours.
Veux-tu m'épouser?

[אהובתי], יקירתי, נשמה שלי, אאהב אותך לנצח.
התהיי לי לאישה?

Progress chart at 100%!

[], mano meilė, mano stebuklas, aš tave amžinai mylėsiu.  Ar tekėsi už manęs?

[], my darling, my miracle, I thee shall forever love.  Wilt thou marry me?

The answers were:
Oui!
כן!
Jo!
Yes!

Where to from here?

My immediate goal is to get a start as a Ruby software developer, and to work in a location that allows me to move to Lara, Victoria, where my fiancée lives.  Our dream is to get married, have a family, and have many children.  My heart's desire is to provide for my future family, and it is the motive that drives all my endeavours.  My beloved is the embodiment of Christian virtue and every line of code I wrote brings me one step closer to the responsible, meaningful, intentional life I have always dreamed of, and which, at times in my despair I thought forever beyond my grasp.

But now it is within my grasp and the thing required of me is to study hard and work smart.

Now back to work and the next chapter of a wonderful life.

Getting started with Rakefile and testing

Up to chapter 47 of Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and I have uploaded version 0.01 of my little text adventure, Treehouse Prince.

https://github.com/clockworkpc/treehouseprince/tree/master/skeleton

The purpose of working on this is to familiarise myself with the fundamentals of testing.  As I put back all the components of the game, I shall get to see how the Rakefile saves me running the game manually a thousand times over.

Ruby Project Skeleton Generator on Gist!

Exercise 46 of Learn Ruby the Hard Way gives instructions for manually creating a project skeleton.  So I decided to do what I have done many times before in BASH and Python, and automate this task with a pretty Ruby script.

A few thoughts:

1. Ruby's handling of files and folders is delightfully straightforward.
2. Ruby handles strings elegantly.
3. This was originally written as a straight script, but then I refactored it with object-oriented programming in mind:
1. One Class (Project)
2. The main components of the class broken down into methods.
3. Names of folders and files are stored in an array and a hash.
4. Blocks of text are stored using Squiggly HEREDOC

Enjoy the code!