DO THE WORKScottish Ruby Conference 2014

Lori Olson

LORI OLSON

• lori@wndx.com

• www.wndx.com

• @wndxlori

• Freelance developer, mentor, trainer

• CANADA!

KUDOSChanging the world, one Thank You at a time!

kudosnow.com

LADIES LEARNING CODEInstructor/Mentor

TELL YOU A STORY

I’m going to tell you a story.

CAUTIONARY TALE

It’s a somewhat cautionary tale

DOWN THE RABBIT HOLE

About just how far down the rabbit hole you can go…

INSTEAD OF DOING THE WORK

when, instead of doing the work

FALL INTO THE TRAP OF AVOIDING THE WORK

you fall into the trap of avoiding the work, looking for the easy way out.

THE STORY

WRITE A RUBYMOTION APP

As a side project, to learn more about RubyMotion and iOS Development

WIMBYWells 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….

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.

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.

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.

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.

I MUST DO SOMETHING

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

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.

LOADS OF DATAThere are over 750,000 oil and gas wells in Canada, and of

those, over 244,000 are abandoned.

THATS A LOT OF WELLS

to keep track of

FOR AN IOS APP THATS A LOT OF DATA

YOU SHOULD USE CORE DATA

All of my research let me to the conclusion that I needed to use Core Data.

CORE DATAin 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.

I BET THERE’S A GEM

FOR THAT

Isn’t there always?

–@topfunky

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

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.

SO MANY REQUIREMENTS SO LITTLE TIME

PRELOADING *LOTS* OF DATA

NON-TRIVIAL DATA MODEL

RELATIONSHIPS

FILTERby location

LIST

MAP

PART TIME

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

RESEARCHa.k.a. Yak Shaving

And so it went. I researched, and I researched some more. And then so more. And so it went.

NOTHING WORKS

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

–@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.

DIDN'T KNOW ENOUGH

about Core Data

DIDN'T UNDERSTAND THE GEMS

And because I didn’t know enough about Core Data, I didn’t really understand how the gems worked

COULDN'T MODIFY THE GEMS

And because I didn’t understand how they worked, I couldn’t really modify them easily, either.

THE IRONY

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

–@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.

DO THE WORKback to the basics

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

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.

READ THE API

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

READ THE EXAMPLES

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

FIND MORE EXAMPLES

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

IMPLEMENT SAMPLE SOLUTIONS

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

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.

@SERIOUSPONYOn 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

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

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.

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.

PERILS

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

EXPERT BEGINNERHow 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

@SERIOUSPONYOn 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

ADVANTAGES

What are the advantages of doing the work?

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.

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

CORE DATA IN MOTIONhttp://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.

DO THE WORK!

Thanks for listening!

Finnegan says…