Do The Work - ScotRuby - Speaker Deck

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DO THE WORK Scottish Ruby Conference 2014 Lori Olson

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LORI OLSON • [email protected] • www.wndx.com • @wndxlori • Freelance developer, mentor, trainer • CANADA!

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KUDOS Changing the world, one Thank You at a time! kudosnow.com

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LADIES LEARNING CODE Instructor/Mentor

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TELL YOU A STORY I’m going to tell you a story.

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CAUTIONARY TALE It’s a somewhat cautionary tale

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DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE About just how far down the rabbit hole you can go…

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INSTEAD OF DOING THE WORK when, instead of doing the work

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FALL INTO THE TRAP OF AVOIDING THE WORK you fall into the trap of avoiding the work, looking for the easy way out.

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THE STORY

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WRITE A RUBYMOTION APP As a side project, to learn more about RubyMotion and iOS Development

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WIMBY Wells In My Back Yard So I picked WIMBY, or Wells in My Back Yard. That’s a play on NIMBY, or Not In My Back Yard. ! You might call that a garden….

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CALMAR, ALBERTA, CANADA • "According to the records, they believed that somewhere in that vicinity was a well site," recalled Ms. Beaudry, 45, a mother of two. They guessed right. In her backyard, a metre from her house, crews found a broken, leaking, 50-year-old natural gas well.

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BUT WHY? HOW? How is it even possible for people to not know they have an abandoned well on their property? ! Once the wells were abandoned, Imperial/Texaco Canada surrendered the lease back to the landowner and consequently no longer had an interest in the lands. Caveats were later removed from the land titles because there was no regulatory requirement that provided for registration of well locations on land titles once activity had ceased.

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WELLS ABANDONED IMPROPERLY It was only in the mid 60’s that rules and regulations acquired some teeth, and wells had to be abandoned according to well-established, well-regulated procedures.

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HOMES TORN DOWN • The re-abandonment of the 1-36 wellbore required the acquisition and removal of ﬁve Evergreen Crescent properties to accommodate the safe operation of a drilling rig. A quote from the Imperial Oil website, w.r.t. the Calmar incident.

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I MUST DO SOMETHING So, having encounter this story, I felt I must do something. But what?

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DATA. GOT THAT In fact, I spent the better part of 7 years immersed in the Oil & Gas data used by most of the Canadian oil industry, and provided by 2 of the biggest data vendors in the business.

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LOADS OF DATA There are over 750,000 oil and gas wells in Canada, and of those, over 244,000 are abandoned.

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THATS A LOT OF WELLS to keep track of

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FOR AN IOS APP THATS A LOT OF DATA

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YOU SHOULD USE CORE DATA All of my research let me to the conclusion that I needed to use Core Data.

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CORE DATA in RubyMotion And there-in lies the problem. Not just using Core Data, where there are books and tutorials galore, but using it in RubyMotion, not so much.

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I BET THERE’S A GEM FOR THAT Isn’t there always?

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–@topfunky @charliesome You must be new to Ruby. We write 16 different independent gems for everything here. ;-)

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SO MANY GEMS • motion-sqlite • Nitreon • Magical Record • Superbox • Motiondata • MotionModel • CDQ Why yes, in fact, there are a lot of gems. And where there are many options there are so many opportunities to become lost in analysis paralysis.

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SO MANY REQUIREMENTS SO LITTLE TIME

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PRELOADING *LOTS* OF DATA

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NON-TRIVIAL DATA MODEL

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RELATIONSHIPS

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FILTER by location

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LIST

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MAP

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PART TIME But I was only doing this little project on the side. Part time. Evenings & weekends.

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RESEARCH a.k.a. Yak Shaving And so it went. I researched, and I researched some more. And then so more. And so it went.

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NOTHING WORKS Eventually, I came to a CONCLUSION. Nothing works. At least, not for the specific requirements that my application had.

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–@scottdavis99 Young C is expending an extraordinary amount of energy ﬁnding shortcuts rather than just doing the work. Future #convict or #programmer? I saw this and thought… this is me. Instead of just buckling down, and doing the work of figuring out Core Data for myself, I wasted all that time trying to use other people’s code that was not suited to my core requirements.

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DIDN'T KNOW ENOUGH about Core Data

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DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE GEMS And because I didn’t know enough about Core Data, I didn’t really understand how the gems worked

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COULDN'T MODIFY THE GEMS And because I didn’t understand how they worked, I couldn’t really modify them easily, either.

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THE IRONY I tried to use gems as a shortcut, only to end up wasting more time than just DOING THE WORK.

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–@bketelsen spent 6 hours researching a way to do it the easy way, when I could have written it in 3, the hard way. Yup, I resembled this guy too. I wasted 3 weeks of part time efforts, digging into all those gems, so I wouldn’t have to learn Core Data for myself.

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DO THE WORK back to the basics So, after all that, I needed to go back, and actually spend time figuring out Core Data in RubyMotion for myself.

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LEARN THE SDK Because RubyMotion, for all it lets you code in Ruby, does not relieve you of the need to learn the Apple iOS SDK’s.

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READ THE API And what does that mean? Learn the SDK. It meant going back, and actually reading the Apple documentation for Core Data.

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READ THE EXAMPLES It meant downloading and reading the example code that comes with the API documentation.

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FIND MORE EXAMPLES It meant finding some Objective C posts about using Core Data (on Ray Wenderlich’s fab site).

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IMPLEMENT SAMPLE SOLUTIONS and using those examples, walking thru them, and translating them into RubyMotion.

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HARD PROBLEMS ARE HARD Along the way I (re)discovered… hard problems are hard. Most of my requirements turned out to be fairly challenging problems, in and of themselves. Most gems are make tedious things simple. But they don’t really tackle the hard problems.

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@SERIOUSPONY On expertise and just how deep the rabbit hole goes Most of the gems stop at the “Turns out it’s quite simple”. ! Most of my requirements drove me all the way into “OMG complex!” ! * https://twitter.com/seriouspony/status/419887010388537344/photo/1

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Turns out, I was sort of glad that none of those gems worked for me. I learned SO MUCH.

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I KNOW! I’LL WRITE A BOOK NOW! So much in fact, that I ended up with enough material to write a whole book on the subject of Core Data in Ruby Motion.

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DOING THE WORK The moral of this long and involved tale that is somewhat embarrassing and somewhat uplifting is that when the problem you are attempting to solve is core to your application, sometimes what you need to do is just sit down, and do the work.

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PERILS What are the perils involved in avoiding “Doing the work”?

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EXPERT BEGINNER How Developers Stop Learning: Rise of the Expert Beginner This is where you learn just enough to think you are proficient, but really, you never get to be an expert at anything. Lots of developers fall into this trap. We need to dig a little deeper, avoid the easy solutions, and do the work. ! http://www.daedtech.com/how-developers-stop-learning-rise-of-the-expert-beginner

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@SERIOUSPONY On expertise and just how deep the rabbit hole goes The expert beginner gets stuck in that trough, and never realizes there is more to learn ! * https://twitter.com/seriouspony/status/419887010388537344/photo/1

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ADVANTAGES What are the advantages of doing the work?

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LEARNING IS ITS OWN REWARD Ok, sure it’s a cliche, but that doesn’t make it less true. There is deep satisfaction in deep diving into learning, and becoming truly expert in something.

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BELONG BY DOING This is a great quote. I wish I could track down where it came from. ! Do the work.

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CORE DATA IN MOTION http://coredatainmotion.com And of course, maybe you too, will some day discover that you have learned enough about a difficult topic that you have enough material at your fingertips to write a book.

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DO THE WORK! Thanks for listening! Finnegan says…