Update

Family have gone away and I needed some initiative and accountability to keep me focused on some of my goals. At the moment that is health/weight loss post COVID and getting inspired on some of my side projects to drive them to completion. I feel that a daily reminder to do 1 hour of code a day for #100DaysOfCode might help me drive some change.

The code

1 thing I wanted to do was to write these here thoughts in a blog of sorts and I thought it would be a good idea to use jekyll and github pages. Well that sunk as I assumed I would quickly stumble upon a “getting started” guide. First I found a publish your theme where I only learnt to add github-pages gem and create a gh-branch. Nothing about how to run Jekyll. Soon after I found another post that suggested to install the jekyll gem and running bundle exec jekyll showed me to run the command

bundle exec jekyll new  .

Not too sure if it worked yet as it seemed to hang, probably as I ran it on it’s “own” directory . ? I do have a blog that I am writing in so maybe it is all good. But prior to have this blog actually running I did struggle for a long time as I had not read the lack of support for Ruby 3 and, well it fails in Ruby 3.

# starting with
ruby -v
ruby 3.2.0preview1

bundle exec jekyll serve
...
  Liquid Exception: undefined method `untaint' for
  "Day 1 - #100DaysOfCode":String
  CGI.escapeHTML(input.to_s).untaint unless input.nil?
                           ^^^^^ in /_layouts/post.html

jekyll 3.9.2 | Error:  undefined method `untaint' for
  "Day 1 - #100DaysOfCode":String

      CGI.escapeHTML(input.to_s).untaint unless input.nil?
                                 ^^^^^
.../3.2.0+1/gems/liquid-4.0.3/lib/liquid/standardfilters.rb:43:
  in `escape': undefined method `untaint' for
  "Day 1 - #100DaysOfCode":String (NoMethodError)

      CGI.escapeHTML(input.to_s).untaint unless input.nil?
                                 ^^^^^
  from .../3.2.0+1/gems/liquid-4.0.3/lib/liquid/strainer.rb:56:in `invoke'
  ...

Ideas for next time

As yet I am not sure what to expect or aim for in my #100DaysOfCode, practice, learning, hacks a side project? I thought I would write down some initial ideas and potential paths, this will let me check in how my expectations change over time.

  1. Side projects get stuck into a side project of mine to build over the course of this challenge. Things like “Real Code Problems” a TDD (Test Driven Development) “code exercise” site for real life web site code challenges like build a blog, a Twitter clone, an ecommerce marketplace, etc.
  2. Hacks simple hack projects like: “verify the telemarketer” a site to generate a form for a telemarketer to get some verification information, maybe even send them an email to the organisation they belong with a code they can read out to you to verify they are legit. I heard a talk at a recent Ruby On Rails Oceanea meetup about “Memes and Errors” and using Memes as a learning tool - well I want to create a page to quickly allow developers learn and generate their own Memes based on things they learn/discover, maybe even a plugin for chrome to make Rails errors change into Memes?
  3. Learning continue my learning of a language like Rust or F# using initially Exercism.org
  4. Code Practice re run some exercises from things like AdventOfCode.com
  5. TIL “today I learnt” segement where a problem I came across at work I recreate and extend up, I saw an interesting idea of using sidekiq-status to display a status bar of the progress of a running job and extend that by interpolating where the job is up to using JavaScript to make the progress bar smooth, even though it polls the status once a second or similar
  6. Coding Videos do some online coding videos like my idea of Arduino vs WebApp where I build and use Arduino/ESP32 input/output boards and emulate the equivalent using an online WebApp
  7. Training Videos I have an idea for a training series of vidoes on getting started in Ruby on Rails as well as how to BDD (Behaviour Driven Development) of your web app with a strong product focus