Railsconf 2015 CFP Announced!

The Call for Proposals for RailsConf 2015 is now open! And guess who's submitting?

Yeah, that was an easy one.

I've actually got two proposals in mind, but one is the kind that just grabs you and has you so excited that your hands shake as you literally dropped what you're doing to grab some paper and start writing furiously. It's a little out there but could be fun. (Or it could completely bomb, but that's the fun part!) And, yes, I know it's really brassy to even consider submitting a proposal to RAILSCONF (!!ZOMG) but 2015 will be my Year of the Brass Ones. :) I'll post more about it soon!

Fastest Summer of My Life!

Time seems to be moving faster and faster. I can hardly believe it's time for another two-week report! I spent a lot of time chasing bugs but I'm making baby steps forward and learning a lot about how Rails and JavaScript work in live code.

Week 7: June 29 - July 5

• On Monday, the OHM team had our monthly Google Hangout (which I have learned is the first Tuesday of the month). The very sketchy notes are posted online.
• At the Hangout, I was introduced to a new resource: the design prototypes for Wikimaps search. I'm pouring over them today. In fact, I spent an inordinate amount of time reading new material and going through archives to catch up. At every Hangout or meeting, I come across more terms and talking points that leave me confused. I'm filling in the gaps. My reading list has included:
• reports on Zurich Hackathon
• the Wikimaps Search Design page above
• more on vector rendering of tiles in preparation for my next steps
• RfC for How to Deal with Open Datasets
• Overview of Wikimaps
• I am getting most anxious about continuing to work on my own branch of the OHM for so long. I would like to push to Master soon, but I need a better-working demo before I do so.
• I've been spending a lot of time there attempting to craft an appropriate request to get something other than a doctored error message to appear on the site when searching by year.
• The most excellent Frances Hocutt introduced me to the Wikidata API Sandbox. It is proving quite helpful. APIs are a whole new world to me.
• To appease my anxiety, I submitted a pull request with my most up-to-date code. 

Week 8: July 6 - July 13

• And the code I've written was deemed not yet ready for prime time - it only works halfway at this point. I will resubmit after I get the code up to production standard.
• After some useful feedback on the importance of submitting a pull request with only one commit (and some pointers to how-to's on rebasing to make that happen) and the helpfulness of of including *lots* of screenshots showing the software in action, I closed the pull request.
• One (!!) of the aspects of this project that I have found especially challenging is finding my way through the blending of JavaScript and Rails code. I spent an inordinate amount of time this week chasing down what turned out to be a Javascript syntax error that was manifesting as a Rails error.
• I've installed the "better_errors" gem to try to assist with errors like this - it will presumably be triggered if it is a true Rails error
• I've also learned that if I make changes to the JavaScript portions of the code, I have to restart the server in order to see any changes. Most changes to the Ruby code automagically propagates without restarting the server.
• Screenshots of my progress so far are on GitHub. Searching by year (2008 and 2009) will bring up the Burning Man map layers for those years and recenter the map to that area. Searching by any other year brings up with message that this is a work in progress. (It no longer crashes the map and brings up the dreaded Rails error screen, so there's some progress there!)