I do this excellent thing where I forget to post to my blog in umpteen years and it stinks. I’m mainly dissapointed in myself because I know there were a lot of life milestones that I forgot to write down in there and remembering all the things I did is a tall order, but I’ll try.

Last week Monday I began the journey into finding a job. I’ve been here before, my cohortmates have all been here before, but this time it feels a little different. I think the difference, for me at least, tends to be that my qualifications seem to better fit the jobs I am applying for.

Woah, what a three week period. DBC has proved every bit exciting as I thought it would be. I have felt happy, angry, sad, excited, challenged, comforted, loved and basically any other emotion over the past 3 weeks. Today we were assessed on our understanding of the Phase 1 fundamentals and if the instructor’s felt we were ready to move onto the next part of the program.

Today we worked in SQL queries and writing Ruby to translate SQL database rows into Ruby objects. This, in itself, was just extremely exciting and warrants its own blog post, but today I want to write about the difference between using single and double quotes in Ruby.

As you may have noticed, this little website of mine has a little bit of a new layout. The main changes I made were to use a Jekyll backbone to run my posts and website. I’m still hosting on Github (as is evident by the url) but I want everyone to stick with me while I work on making this site awesome!

The art of asking a ‘good question’ is quickly becoming a very important aspect of my coding thus far. I often find myself searching the Internet for an answer to a puzzling question re our DBC prep work thus far. It would be easy to search the question in its entirety but that would just give you results that tell you the entire answer and not how to get there.

Wo-hoo! Active record! While one would not regularly address something such as Active Record with such excitement and enthusiasm, it is extremely important to the Model-View-Controller (MVC) model which Ruby relies on. Active record handles the transformation of data from a database, such as a SQL table, to a Ruby object.

SQL databases are an amazing tool and can do a ridiculous amount of things. The problem with amazing tools like this one is that can perform so many functions, which creates a whole slew of computer processing problems. So, as we learn about databases and how to create, manipulate, and store data we will also need to learn how to optimize these tables to return query results in the shortest amount of time possible.