RubyConf 2014

Cómo desarrollamos una aplicación de aparcamiento con Ruby en cuatro semanas

Liz Rush, Hsing-Hui Hsu  · 

Transcripción

Extracto de la transcripción automática del vídeo realizada por YouTube.

okay welcome to our talk good luck with that tag teaming civic data I'm Liz rush and I'm sing way sue and we're both recent graduates of the first cohort of ADA developers Academy we want to share the story of our year long road to becoming real

developers and some of the lessons that we learned along the way presented through the lens of a case study of our ongoing project will show you how we learn how to get unstuck from common problems new developers make and throughout the talk will present seven

takeaways that we came up with over the course of this project so for the senior devs in the room we think you'll recognize the experiences we had and the lessons we learned and for the less experienced here today we hope that you will walk away from this

talk with more tools to help you bridge the gap from beginner to professional developer so a bit about ourselves I graduated college with a degree in clarinet performance and also French by accident this allowed me to work in France which is really just a

way to fund my ultimate frisbee habit and this proved to be such a successful strategy that I went on to learn a few other languages and at that point thought talking to computers is probably even more interesting than talking to humans so I decide to go into

programming and i also have a language background before learning to code I worked in digital marketing and then moved into technical and legal translation eventually I found my way to translating apps and got myself roped into manual regression testing after

beginning to automate some of those tests and seeing the parallels between translation and code I decided to pursue programming luckily for both of us a new unproven experimental program called ADA developers Academy was just beginning to take shape so we

decided to jump in for those of you who haven't heard of ADA before it's a non-profit tuition free code school in Seattle focusing on training women making career shifts into tech the program is industry driven with professionals companies and community

members all contributing to the open-source curriculum it focuses on web development using ruby on rails as well as general software engineering principles such as software architecture test driven development and agile the program's a year long separated

into two six-month phases the first six months consists of in-class instruction and the second six months is spent in an internship with a local tech company in Seattle our six-month classroom experience started with one month of learning pure Ruby followed

by rails projects in short one to two weeks prints that we completed in pairs or in teams of four the classroom portion culminated in a final four week-long self-directed capstone project sing way and I had previously worked together on a two-week rails app

and that's when we discovered where individual interests and strengths lie yeah Liz likes fronting JavaScript frameworks UX and mobile where's my more inclined towards databases api's and back-end work and we both really enjoy the challenge of

architecting a project together so we decided to pair on our capstone which was an app that would make use of the city of Seattle's open data initiative to provide users with a way to discover street parking restrictions in their area so our project is

very much an example of the scratch your own itch principle about three months before even beginning to think about capstone projects I had borrowed my brother's car and needed to park it near my apartment not only did it take me 20 minutes of prowling

just to find a spot but once I did I got out of the car and found the nearest pole with parking signs then I realized there were multiple different and conflicting rules and I was left more confused than before we're both car free cyclists but we knew

intuitively that this was a problem that would need solving for more than just ourselves parking in seattle is polemic but everybody agrees that the parking signs themselves are basically gibberish so here's a particularly egregious example it appears

as if every sign contradicts the one before it and as a final cruel joke they tacked on west of here when the direction this photo is taken were all east of all of these signs so where does that leave us we had been granted a week of free play in Ada before

the capstone started which I spent doing research simply enough I just googled to find out if somebody had solved the problem for me and while there were no mobile apps it turns out the City of Seattle in fact headache parking restrictions map on their website

I investigated the different data sets available through the city's open data initiative and so crowd a portal and I also managed to get a contact at the City of Seattle not in their parking or transportation department but an engineer on their web team

so this is the way that the City of Seattle government implements a map showing parking information they use ping overlays on map tiles to show the different parking categories as you can see it's a bit hard to read the categories aren't really very

clear and the data is static we thought we could do better our idea was to use the data to display parking information in a simpler more human friendly way so for example rendering just green lines for available street parking and red lines for no parking

so we were pretty excited there was open data available we had a contact in the city and we had a starting point to improve on as newbies to programming we had picked up on the trick that sometimes the key to solving a difficult problem was knowing that a

solution was possible or at least deluding yourself into that belief morale was pretty high but knowing that this would acquire some help from the City of Seattle government we called our contact we explained our idea what we thought we could do hoping to

get some feedbacks or tips as we embarked on the journey and he said well if you think you can build it you'll be the first good luck with that ha ha ha ha ha ha ha and then he hung up on us seriously so yeah in spite of this ringing endorsement the guy

did provide us with a link to their ArcGIS server which is what their web application was using to generate the parking maps but we had never used an ArcGIS server before the s3 website told us all about the different tools that ArcGIS provided including a

way to dynamically generate KML files that we needed for our project so this is perfect except it turns out that our perfect resource wasn't so perfect after all as you can see there were quite a few implementation problems almost every informational link

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