bradwrage blogg

For the last few months I’ve been putting in some good quality time to dedicate to learning Ruby on Rails.  Although only able to do the basics, I feel I’ve come extremely far.  The ability to quickly get a working web app up and going is such a great feeling.  With only a little bit of programming experience, I have listened to the advice the great rails creators like David Hansson and jumped in without even having a concrete understanding of the ruby language.  It can be done.  Do it.

Three great resources I’ve been using to get up and going.

1) Agile Web Development with Rails 3rd Edition

2) www.railscasts.com

3) #rubyonrails irc chat room on the freenode (an incredible resource).

April 27, 2009, 9:25pm   Comments

Now into my last quarter at Cal Poly, I have to say that I’m having mixed feelings.  After five years I’m thrilled to be getting out, but at the same time I don’t know whether I feel that I gained great skills and great knowledge.  I can only say there were a handfull of courses that I actually benefited from in those five years and most of them being non-technical.

One of the classes that really standout as an exceptional experience was my classical music appreciation class at the community college before I transfered to Cal Poly.  The professor was a brilliant guy from Austria who had a passion for impacting lives, and was a successful pianist and composer on the side.

So all said and done, I will be leaving Cal Poly and my college experience a bit unsatisfied but ready to be done with school for now and go to work at Cisco.

April 16, 2009, 11:34am   Comments

PolyCareers has been live for a little while now and we have had some great contributions to the site, keeping in mind most of these internship reviews have been from our friends. Now the question is how do we convert the user sign-ups to actual reviews. I’m seeing user sign-ups daily but no reviews coming from those sign-ups. I think the problem is users are expecting a different page that allows actions to be taken after signing up. We need more clarity in usability. Any thoughts on how we can improve?

April 14, 2009, 11:27am   Comments

As a student at Cal Poly, there have been a couple of different ways that students have been able to sell their books to one another besides the usual of getting ripped off by selling back to the campus book store.  One: ScrewTheBookStore.com and Two: Uloop.com.

I originally used screwthebookstore.  Why? because there were enough students on it buying and selling.  There was already a community there.  How did they get this community?  They were one of the first online sites up that offered this service.  Similar to myspace, word of mouth soon becomes the selling point when there is not much else out there.

Since then, a new service has come onto the scene called Uloop.  I like Uloop much more and they have recently won me over.  I made this transition just recently due to the fact that screwthebookstore was not working.  The site was incredibly slow ( not to mention the design is horendous), and I had to a) sell my books back to campus and get ripped, or b) find another service out there.  Uloop does a lot right.  For one, they make signups easy.  All you need is a .edu email address, which is great because allthough the audience is large, it is still niche.  The design is great.  My good friend James Edmondson who is one of the best graphic designers I know, if not the best at the young ripe of of just 21, introduced me to the css grid concept which he used with PolyCareers.com.  Uloop also uses the grid, which keeps things simple and intuitive.  37 Signals Jason Fried is a huge advocate of this and created a bit of controversy when he stated that the Drudge Report is one of the best designed sites on the web.  Lastly, Uloops works.  I am easily able to post items for sale and search for items I need.  The community has definitely grown since I last checked it out,  making it a great compository for content.

April 09, 2009, 9:44am   Comments

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April 08, 2009, 12:34pm   Comments

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April 07, 2009, 9:02am   Comments

After following a tuturial on rails that used mysql for development I’m moving onto something much more easier and robust.  Being able to create a database in an app simply by using the $rake db:create, then creating the controllers, views, and models using the $rake db:migrate to generate the mysql table structure is awesome.  For more on this awesome easy setup check out the rails guides.

April 05, 2009, 7:05pm   Comments

David’s talk “The Real World” is awesome.  I posted earlier on a few points he made during the FOWA dublin event about being productive, using a 4 hour work week, and creating something simple.  Now the video of his talk is out and I highly recommend it here.  A very shocking statement he says is simply “F*** startups!  It’s about creating a business…You’re great idea has to merit with somebody wanting to pay you for your service or product.  How do I figure out whether it’s a viable business?  I ask myself would I get out my credit card and pay for it?”  I think this really hits the nail on the head.  I am guilty myself in that I am always thinking startup startup startup, I want to create a startuppp!!..when really this is rubbish.  It’s about creating a business that I am passionate about and something that really solves a need.

March 31, 2009, 10:51am   Comments

Bart didn’t seemed fased by it like everyone else.

March 19, 2009, 10:45am   Comments

To show a helpful error message in rails simply put

<%= error_messages_for( :class = ‘action’) %> in the view that you want the error message to show.  Now this will work when you have some validation code in your model related to the view.  For example “validates_presence_of :title :artist”.  So when a user forgets to enter in the required fields they will be notified which fields they left out.

March 18, 2009, 11:06am   Comments