Thursday knowledge sharing

Early on in our second week, Chris came across the learning objectives for the Rails engineering project. Having looked through these criteria as a group we decided, in line with pursuing our personal learning goals alongside the group’s dream of producing a Facebook for pets, we would each pick several topics, research and present them to the group on Thursday afternoon.

The aim was to get an in-depth understanding of something we were currently not fully comfortable with and share this knowledge. We asked Eddie (a Maker’s coach) to sit in on the session to field questions on difficult areas and provide feedback on our group.

The topics chosen were:

1. Compare and contrast Rails to another MVC framework.
2. Diagram the sequence of events when you run the rails server.
3. Diagram a request and response cycle of a user interacting with the rails app.
4. Evaluate the benefits and drawbacks of convention over configuration.
5. Describe the primary aspects of rails that utilise this idiom (convention over configuration).
6. Describe the asset pipeline.
7. Describe ActiveRecord associations.
8. Describe ActiveRecord callbacks.
9. Understand the relationship between resources and REST.
10. Understand nested routing and how to restrict resources routes using except and only.
11. Describe the relationship between link_to and rails routing.
12. Consider the pros and cons with rails views and consider alternatives.
13. Describe the different types of tests and their purpose you can use to test a rails app.
14. Explain why most rails web apps are feature and unit tested.
15. Identify and utilise the main rails Rake tasks and generators.
16. Evaluate Shoulda.

The breadth of topics and informal, inquisitive format of the session meant we were all involved in presenting, questioning and discussing. In particular Rob and Chris’ presenting styles were noted by Eddie as being excellent, both coming prepared with questions for the group.

Taking the time to gain a deeper understanding of some of the fabled ‘Rails magic’ was one of my standout points of the week. The session proved to be incredibly useful and taking the time off from coding to focus on personal learning was really valuable.