Ruby Co-working and Internship placements

Jennifer Kinsey
Aug 8, 2017 · 3 min read

Today I accomplished:

I met with the TomKaneArt crew at a place I picked- a Ruby co-working event at a coffeeshop on the outskirts of town. It was such a big, beautiful, and cheap coffee shop! We worked on some issues we were having with the TKA site. The dang arrow that I fixed was merged into the code. HOWEVER, it refused to work correctly in prod. Like, the html was updated since I moved it out of a div, but the css was not working. We tried so many things like redeploying to Heroku, starting/stopping the server, precompiling the assets, double checking the code was in there, etc, etc. The last thing we tried was deploying the site to another Heroku app, and you know what, it worked just fine. Some of the guys there who were different offering suggestions (initially saying we were probably doing something wrong and it’s never Heroku’s fault!) finally suggested it could be on Heroku’s end. And wouldn’t you know it, after troubleshooting for an hour or so, it finally worked correctly in production? Heroku fixed its own issue.

So lots of finagling things happened. One of our devs fixed an issue with the Stripe API. Some of the views were changed before and it wasn’t getting the email parameter that it needed.

One thing we still need to do is to make the images smaller; it’s taking a long time to load. We just need to figure out how to do this in Paperclip. We probably want it to be a smaller jpg instead of 17 big ole’ 3+ MB png loading.

Also the jumbotron image still looks bad on iPhones — both Chrome and Safari, it seems. We still have to work on a fix for this one. None of us are terribly front-end-y so we are having a time with it. It’s especially annoying as we were developing mobile-first and it looked fine in the Chrome Development tools for various devices. I guess I will make sure to consider that going forward: Don’t count on the developer tools to actually simulate correctly how something will look.

During the middle of our meet, we got our emails with what internships we would be going to. I didn’t get my top pick, but I did get my second pick. Everyone who interviewed with my top pick pretty much put them at #1. I really wanted it because they seemed like a good company, they were a Rails shop, and they were going to be hiring. I know I don’t wow people with my first impression so interviewing has always been hard for me. Getting my foot in the door in an internship and having people get to know me always works for me. Then they can actually see that I’m a hard worker, I want to learn, I get along really well with people, and hey, I’ve even got jokes once you get to know me.

All that being said, I think my second pick will be a great time. If it weren’t for the hiring factor of the other company, it would have been my #1 pick. The interviewer seemed like he really wanted to be a mentor and help out and we could pick the project we wanted to work on. Additionally, I’ve got one of my pals in the internship too. Even though it’s remote, we will probably meet up a lot to work on our projects.

As a consolation prize, I got a $5 burger from a place in Portland that’s part of the Burger Week thing going on here. Paired with a beer, it was amazing.

Keep trucking.