You ever think to yourself, “I’m gonna make my own clothes!” and maybe you know how to sew a little so you go to the fabric store and you find yourself a pattern (and spend way more on fabric than it would have cost you at the Gap but no mind! you’re self-sufficient! it’s not about how much you spend, you’re making a point!) and you get into it and suddenly you’re like “how do i make my own bias tape” and “why are these darts not laying properly” and “whoopsie I sewed the pocket to the outside of the dress!” and you say to yourself, I need to slow my roll a bit and learn some basics.
Now instead of clothes pretend it’s a tiny web app and you’re inside my head.
So yday you’ll recall I made a little game called Guess the Number. Its rules are simple: you guess a number between 0 and 99, and the computer will tell you when you are too low, too high, or just right. It’s pretty special. Anyways, so I thought I might like for my two darling children thousands of miles away in San Francisco to play Guess the Number. I also thought I might like to make my friends (also thousands of miles away in San Francisco sigh) proud of me by doing a thing. They’re p smart and also tend to make super neat suggestions about improvements or additions.
Anyways so for all these reasons (also intrinsic: also I wanted to do the thing, if that wasn’t clear) I was like I’LL JUST FIRE UP SINATRA AND OFF TO THE RACES ETC.
Right, it turns out I don’t know how to Sinatra. Also it turns out I don’t know how to do a lot of ruby. So I backed way up to the Fun With Arrays and Hashes! parts of Learn Ruby the Hard Way, and I’m not afraid to admit it, I’m just gonna do those things (he eventually explains how to Sinatra conveniently). So that’s what I did today. And it’s what I’m going to do tomorrow too. I’m pretty stoked.
On the one hand, this is a terrible post about computering. There’s no code. On the other hand, listen, kid: if you’re gonna computer, some days are just gonna be like this, and if you don’t keep your sense of humor about it, you’re gonna start to Take This Seriously and then you won’t get to laugh when you write three lines of code to turn a range into an array only to realize #to_a is a thing that exists. And you don’t want to miss out on laughs like that. Onward, computers!