see part I here
This is my first real world application, and when you’re first learning to program, you can get carried away on the details and perfectionism arises. This is where your growth as a programmer takes flight. You start planning your application; the ideas are really flowing! Then, you being to realize that your brilliant idea has 27 edge cases, you’re not quite sure how to implement the functionality that you want and what was once optimism has quickly turned to overwhelmism(* Yes, I just made that up).
Not to fear however, this is the lifecycle(hehe) of a programmer.
Idea
\|/
Excitement=> Planning=>Cold Cold Reality of Implementation=>Repeat
You realize that the only way to bring this project to life is if you break everything down into bite size problems. Find the simplest way for your app to work(even if the functionality is off) and get it to that first working state. Then it’s a matter of polishing and building on top of a simple, yet solid foundation. The frustration will undoubtedly still be there, but it’s only a matter of time before you see that spark become a flame
There’s this Frankenstein moment. All of your hard work and the broken=>functioning code cycle has paid off.
There were many obstacles along the way, namely this really wacky DOM structure, where the Date Heading was actually nested really far down and therefore almost impossible to iterate through all dates, and grab the child elements, because the date is actually the child element.
So I ended up grabbing the #items css id tag and iterating through all of it’s child elements to extract the event date, title, location, artists and URL.
after I got my app up and running the final step is to push it to Ruby Gems!
Taken from http://guides.rubygems.org/publishing/
You can try out my app via Ruby Gems with the following command:
$ gem install ra_events
Other resources:
http://blog.thepete.net/blog/2010/11/20/creating-and-publishing-your-first-ruby/
https://gist.github.com/jendiamond/6
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