Adventures in Changing Your Path


From Underwater Acoustics to Web Development, A Transformation

Just don't give up!

So going back and forth between Sinatra, Active Record, Erb, Html, all starts to get a little blurry when you are experiencing it for the first time.


Frame it out!

Shifting gears into Sinatra and absorbing the key concepts can be a little tricky at first. Here’s what I did in the coursework up to the “Sessions” section to keep from going off track.


The weird and precise world of SQL

Starting out with getting used to SQL queries can be a bit of a challenge!


Craigslist Scraping, Ruby Gem CLI part 2

Sometimes, you just don’t know what you are getting into!


Craigslist scraping, IP bans and other adventures.

So the current challenge at Flatiron is to make a functional website scraper, that works down to two layers deep. This is a big deal project, and is assessed. So, wanting to put my best foot forward, instead of rushing into a project, I thought for about a day on what I wanted to create. I had been working a lot with Wikipedia on a side project and at first thought about doing that…but then I recalled there was a video lesson which had some of that in there. So, staying away from safe waters, I started pondering some more. I had been selling some items on Craigslist (CL) and had been thinking about how price is really the key to any sale. Too high and people scoff, too low and people immediately think there is something wrong with your listing. But there is that sweet spot, “market value” as they say, that puts you right into the zone where you can actually make a sale. After all, I thought, I am spending all this time looking at postings on CL and sorting through everything was a little painful. I mean, I had even listed a printer that was already there with two other listings for the exact model…but I never saw them until I had relisted the item and done a more specific search.