I present to you the chronicle of my troubleshooting for the weekend challenge, Instagram clone in Ruby on Rails using Rspec for testing. Warning: This is a 'no such thing as stupid questions' zone!

Our weekend challenge is to recreate Instagram using Rails. The deviation from what we've been learning this week is to add images so my pair partner and I spent the day creating a new app that just allows uploading images to get to grips with the process.

We're also tasked with using Amazon Web Services to host the images, it apparently has a steep learning curve but is an essential part of our training because of its widespread use.

Today we spnt the day breaking, fixing and then breaking most of our code again just to get a deeper undertanding of how it works. It was equal parts awesome, terrifying and painful.

Second day of Rails started off well, became a gruelling challenge and then ended well with some improved understanding! I feel like I'm going to encounter something that makes me hate it but for now I quite like it.

One of the main downsides is having to do things 'The Rails Way', and a side-effect of the fact that it handles a lot of the setup for you is bloated file structures.

Join me after the break for my file tree, if you know Rails you know what' coming...

Checking for the text contained in an input text box with Protractor feature tests proved to be a challenge for me.
After trying by.id, by.class and by.model I started doubting myself and everything around me! Then my good bud Andrea came to the rescue and helped me troubleshoot. Apparently this is a webdriver quirk. Source

There's a weird webdriver quirk that getText() is always empty for "" elements. Try doing userNameInput.getAttribute('value') instead.

Last night I went to bed extremely unhappy with my code. I even had to ask for help on Stack Overflow. As I lay in bed I began to wonder if there could be a better way.

And sure enough there was! More after the break.

I'm sort of ok with my ToDo Challenge JavaScript backend at the moment but need to brush up a lot on my Protractor end-to-end testing and Angular implementation, but I'm sure I'll get there by the Tuesday morning deadline.

An interesting diversion I've taken today is to set up Travis-CI on my own from scratch for this repo. Join me after the break for the detailed steps.

My repo on Github

I started off the day by realising I need to learn a lot more before I can do this challenge justice. I can highly recommend The Angular Intro on Codeschool, it's a concise video series with practical challenges to complete and it taught me a lot about the fundamentals.

As usual we had our weekend challenge issued to us, to create a Single-Page-Application (SPA) ToDo List Manager using JavaScript and whatever libraries we want on top of that.

Seniors gathered around the whiteboard, carrying out an end-of-week retrospective with our coaches.

API, API, API. Oh and also SETUP, SETUP, SETUP.

We're quickly learning that setting up our framework is probably more challenging than writing tests and coding. I pity the poor soul that will depend on me to make the first commit.

This restart of the exercise will need to be finished at some point because we had quite ambitious plans for it, we want to make a Trumps style head-to-head multiplayer game and I'm pretty sure we can get there. Below is the horrid looking proof-of-concept showing that we can return the right data from our API calls.

APIs are proving to be a tough but interesting nut to crack.

We've also started using Protractor for end-to-end feature testing for Angular JS. All these new names are blowing our minds but it's seriously amazing what these apps can do, I am so in love with the way Protractor actually opens a browser window and carries out all the commands you tell it to.

describe('GitHub profile finder', function() {

  var searchBox = element(by.model('searchCtrl.searchTerm'))
  var searchButton = element(by.className('btn'))

  beforeEach(function() {
    browser.get('http://localhost:3000');
  })

  it('has a title', function() {
    expect(browser.getTitle()).toEqual('Github user search');
  });

  it('finds profiles', function() {

    searchBox.sendKeys('spike01');
    searchButton.click();
    var profiles = element.all(by.repeater('user in searchCtrl.searchResult.items'));
    expect(profiles.last().getText()).toEqual('spike01');
  });
});

An e2e Protractor feature test for our Github user search web app.

Angular and Node continues. There is a bit of a learning curve to get to grips with the syntax and the peculiarities of the language but generally speaking I feel like the training has been good enough for us to pick up new languages with relative ease.
Did an athletic restart of the Github user search web app, calling in the Git API, and it went ok. There were a few obstacles yesterday with debugging and a few new obstacles today but calling in help from my fellow cohort soon solved them and by the afternoon I had a finished app ready for styling.

The juniors started at Makers today with a gentle introductory day of getting to meet their cohort and the team here, followed by an afternoon at the pub. Menawhile, us seniors moved on to Angular and Node, needing to get a grasp of the languages very quickly so we can start working with APIs.
The weekly project is a searchable github page pulling in their API, it's exciting new ground. And we have new senior coaches so it's been pretty cool meeting them and learning some hardcore stuff.

Lunchtime talk by Chris from Estimote.

I had a beautiful lie in this morning after going out for a drink with a friend last night and I feel awesome. I could have had another go at the Bowling Challenge but I don't really have the mental energy at the moment and want to rest up for a tough JavaScript week to come.
I did, however, spend the morning on a lovely farm in Essex and intend to whitter away the rest of Sunday playing Counter-Strike:Global Offensive and getting wasted.

I've spent today catching up on sleep so no big developments but I thought I would quickly breakdown the process of creating and setting up an HTML/CSS table with the requisite interactivity provided by JQuery and JavaScript.

My GitHub repo for the Bowling Challenge

Recommended reading for CSS tables

JSFiddle sandbox to experiment and do your setup in