Day 4. Makers Academy. Debugging! (oh, and RSpec).

Reference RSpec and TDD / BDD (I still am cloudy on the practical differences between the two) — it clearly isn’t going away, therefore I need to focus more efforts to understand and utilise it. As I am discovering with my introduction to coding, it is clearly all about practice, and repetition. Even when I have been unable to solve some of the challenges on my own, by looking at the walkthroughs, understanding the code in depth, and then actively trying (from memory) to type that code in, I believe this has improved my understanding of both Ruby and RSpec, and I need to up my practice in actually writing it, in order to improve.

Pair programming was interesting today, as we were beset with a large number of ‘technical’ issues, in that when creating an orphan branch to a repo, in order to pull down a fresh set of code, we still had to deal with merge conflicts and other issues, which unfortunately took considerable time to resolve. I think a lecture specifically aimed on merge conflicts and git trouble shooting would be beneficial, as we were thrown straight into using git to push and pull code to our pair partner (which is fine, and great for learning) but we wasted more time than was necessary if we could have had some pointers to begin with.

We had in interesting lecture on debugging today, where it was advised to use a formulaic process to identify bugs in the code, rather than just random ‘guessing’ — which may result in a find and a ‘solution’ but unless you knew this as a fact, it may have come back to haunt hours or days later. I would have liked more time to play about with the debugging challenge, as we were only offered half an hour — however if we had, I might not have got through as much as we did with the main challenge (which I still have to complete!).

It is amazing though that when I feel down, and feel that i’m not progressing, I only have to look back over this blog to see that I am actually progressing, and despite it being difficult, if someone said I would be writing RSpec tests on a Class based challenge simulating boris bikes, I would have laughed and said that was ridiculous — but we are!