informational | Daniel P. Clark

April 16, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Undefining a CSS attribute (and rant)

Stack Overflow Conduct One downside to Stack Overflow is the abuse of power the higher ranking users exercise when they misunderstand the question posed. Many are too quick to jump the gun on voting out or down questions rather than simply asking for clarification before action is taken. S.O. has guidelines for people to do…

April 4, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Getting Started with MiniTest

Whet ever you may believe about testing practices; tests still provide some peace of mind and clarity in projects. Also; if you build a library for others to use, tests are a form of validation of your work and provide trustworthiness to your code. In the case of working with a large project that is…

March 28, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Work Flow and Making Progress

Getting things done is a highly relevant topic in today’s society. I’m no authority on the subject myself. But I have learned a few things I need to write down for myself, and hey, why not for you as well? I actually find myself going to my blog as reference somewhat often. I want to…

March 15, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Ruby: Actionable Meta

The more you program the more likely you will need to change a string to the object the string represents. For example you may have a string with a mystery class name in it the you need to call methods on. Lets go a step further, lets say the method you need to call on…

March 6, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Numeric Bases and Defining Your Own

Lately I’ve been teaching my niece a new way to do math. She would have difficulty with addition and subtraction of numbers if they contained more than a few digits. I asked her if she’d ever seen a clock where the numbers rolled over (like in the movie Ground Hog Day). She hadn’t. I decided…

February 24, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Writing methods for both class and instance levels

When perusing the Rails documentation for various methods I noticed something that seemed odd to me. The method descriptions seemed to show an extra parameter as the first parameter that I was never using. It’s strange when you use the methods all the time and it doesn’t seem to be implemented the way the documentation…

February 20, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Some Basic Ruby Tools for Sniffing out Errors

Needing to know what’s going on under the hood is a big part to solving problems and challenges. For the longest time I only ever used print statements to output to the console the state of something at a specific point. That’s all I ever used in Python. But sometimes you need to do a…

February 18, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

A Glimpse at Tail Call Recursion

Tail recursion is where a method calls itself. When I first saw tail call recursion I was blown away by it! I found it difficult to wrap my mind around. Thinking about it was like thinking about a snake eating its own tail and I couldn’t see that working out. But, as it turns out,…

February 14, 2015 by Daniel P. Clark

Use the given project generators

Rails Before I started using Rails I was the guy who would type out web projects by hand… I was accustomed to it. I knew what I was working with all the time simply because I wrote it. When I had started reading the docs on Rails I was trying to learn it in this…

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