Everyone knows engineers can’t write! I
is
an
engineeer!
But...
I Wish I Could Write!
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My work folder contains over 100 Rails applications! Granted most of them never went anywhere. They start at Rails v0.8 and go up to the current release. Most of the applications were never planned to go beyond a limited user base. They were custom solutions for a user, agency or group that had unique requirements. Not only do I wish I could write English better, I wish I was a better programmer. Programming has always been an "Additional Duty" for me. I did it because know one else knew how. This whole trip started with a Fortran class at Arizona State in 1970, then we go through: Basic • Assembler • Forth • Pascal • Real Basic • C • COBOL • Smalltalk • PHP • Ada • Forth Dimension • Active4D • Ruby Think I'm missing a few, but that's enough. In all that time I never had a job where I had to code - but I was responsible for code being written by someone a number of times. I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly in programming styles. Just like my golf game, I'll call myself a little above average. My weakness is I'm an 'Old School' programmer - get an idea and start writing code. I can't get my head around testing - I've tried - but failed. Because I've picked up this side knowledge I always been sort of a change agent or problem solver. I see how something is done and think how it can be done better. Doesn't always work but _**anything**_ can be done better. If I couldn't get anyone to implement the idea, I did it myself. There is some crappy code I wrote years ago that is still out there. That's a story for another time. Most of the applications I worked on were _**Bean Counter**_ applications, i.e. some form of accounting. Not always money, but counting, computing and reporting something. Besides some of the crap that is still out there, I have two active deployed applications. <dl class="indent-dd"> <dt><a href="http://vfwpost8600.org/">VFWPost8600.org</a></dt> <dd> This was one of those things where after I became involved in the VFW, someone said "We need a web site". I said I'd build it but don't ask me to write the content. It's now on it's third re-write in 4 years. The first was a prototype, the second one was to take out my kludges and the current one was a refactoring and throwing out what wasn't used (know one wrote content) and concentrated on the back-end bean counting. </dd> <dd> The public view is a very basic "who we are" site, contacts, members etc. The back-end runs the business. Since I and our canteen manager run the business, it's a very targeted for us. There is another version out there that will never go anywhere <a href="http://myvfw.us/">MyVFW.us</a>. Some of the back-end is reporting activities to the State and National VFW organizations. I tried to give it to the state or national but could never get anyone to stop worrying about all the paper reports they had to submit long enough to give it a serious look! (I did spend 22 years in the Military bureaucracy and 20 in the State of Alabama bureaucracy, the VFW is just as bad) </dd> </dl> <dl class="indent-dd"> <dt><a href="http://ptgolf.us/">PtGolf.us</a></dt> <dd> This is my "Learn an new Language" application. PtGolf stands for Point Golf. It an application that manages golf scores for golf groups. Points are a simplified version of a golf handicap. It allows golfer to compete fairly in events between player with different skill sets. Its really noting more than averaging you last X scores (usually 10) to compute a quota. If you pull your quota (score=quota) you've had an ok day. If you pull more than your quota you had a good day (and your quota will go up). If you pull less than your quota, you had a bad day. </dd> <dd> This started as a spread sheet somewhere back in the 80's. May have even been on dBase II on an Apple II running CPM at one point. From there it moved to a couple other databases and languages. In the early 90's it moved to PHP and mysql on a stand alone system. I did export the "Quota List" and put it in a back door on what was one of the first, if not the first Web Sites in Alabama. It was converted to RoR v1.0 and appeared on-line as GolfGaggle.com. That went through Rails 2, 3 and 4, before I replaced it with PtGolf in Rails 5, Zurb Foundation and all that stuff. It's actually scaled back a little - I tried to do too many things that groups were not interested in. </dd> </dl> That's enough history for now. I did learn a lot over the last 8 or so years, but not enough. Then I forget how I did something and have to go find it. That's the reason I'm going to attempt to document some of the techniques I used or created. .md
My Rails Projects
February 20, 2017 02:10