Jack Kinsella's Blog, page 12

Janki Method Refined

Apologies: Unfortunately all images related to this article have been lost

Over the last few years I've made a public fuss about using spaced-repetition flashcards to speed up learning programming. I'm aware that the novelty of an idea can overshadow rational evaluation of its usefulness so the aim of this post is to follow up my early enthusiasm and refine my methodology following a further year's experience in unfailing daily card reviews.

I've condensed this into point form to save us bot...

Awareness Through the Creation of Jargon

The Sapir-Whorf hypothesis holds that linguistic categories and usage influence thought and behaviour. While itâs relatively uncontroversial that such a link exists, the strength of the link is hotly debated. An example of a strong statement of this hypothesis is the fictional Newspeak language in Orwellâs 1984, a language used as a tool of oppression that functions through the removal of the vocabulary of revolution. Personally I donât believe the strong version of this hypothesisâin such a...

Debugging Rails with Pry Debugger

Part 3 in the series A Comprehensive Guide To Debugging Rails

Rails Debugging with Pry

If you donât yet know what a debugging session is, think of it as opening the Rails console at a chosen point in the execution path.

I assume below that you have installed the Pry-debugger and the pry-stack_explorer gems.

At any point in your source code (including within the downloaded code of the gems included into your Gemfile and conveniently opened in the text editor with bundle open gem_name) you can...

Debugging Rails with Operating System Tools

Part 4 in the series A Comprehensive Guide To Debugging Rails

Operating System Level Mirrors

Domain name/DNS info: View and debug DNS/IP issues using nslookup. To see the mail records (MX) for a domain type $ nslookup -type=mx oxbridgenotes.co.uk (note that you need to drop any possible âwwwâ in front of the domain here). Look up the IP addresses associated with a domain using $ nslookup www.oxbridgenotes.co.uk. Find out how long a DNS record will be cached for with $ nslookup -debug www.ox...

Debugging Rails with Online or Third Party Tools

Part 6 in the series A Comprehensive Guide To Debugging Rails

Online and Third Party Mirrors Google Webmaster Tools: Google Webmaster Tools helps you evaluate your websites health in Google search engine results by providing reports about how many URLs were indexed by Google, what search engine queries your website ranks for, and how many URLs were contained in your sitemap. Webmaster tools also lists web-crawler errors, thereby indicating pages that 404 or have incorrect permissions. Webmas...

Debugging Rails With Chrome DevTools

Part 10 in the series A Comprehensive Guide To Debugging Rails

Chrome DevTools Mirrors

Chrome DevTools Elements: The Elements tab is helpful in debugging HTML and CSS and for receiving rapid feedback about experimental design changes. To activate DevTools Elements right click a HTML element on any webpage and select âinspect elementâ. Youâll see a pane that includes the source code of the final HTML page, as output by your Rails application. Useful features here include dragging and droppin...

Debugging Rails With Built-in Tools

Part 1 in the series A Comprehensive Guide To Debugging Rails

Ruby / Rails Built-in Mirrors

Ruby compiler checks: Run $ ruby -c myfile.rb to ask Ruby to check the syntax of your script and find serious errors that would stop your program from even starting. The syntax checker does not actually run your code, so thereâs no need to worry about the program being syntax checked performing some destructive action that would occur were the code executed normally. Given the size of a Rails project...

On Passive Income

On 23 April, 2014 I gave this speech to the Berlin chapter of the 4 Hour Work Week Entrepreneurs and Lifestyle Designers Group. The focus is on passive income, and it applies chiefly to people starting out, but is also of interest to established business owners wishing to remove their labour with minimum sacrifice in quality.

Intro

For the last four years Iâve been blessed with a passive income source where the entire sales process is automatic and, if I so desire, I can forget about the inco...

Automating Popularity

Two years ago I wrote a program that logged into my Facebook account and pretended to be me. I wanted to test the hypothesis that automatic tools could make someone more popular.

If I could build a script that caused more friends to get in touch with me, then my hypothesis would be proven true. If, instead, the script had no effect on my popularity or was detected as a fraud by the people in my network, then my hypothesis would be proven false.

Before I carried out the experiment I studied so...

Janki Method

EDIT: Update To JANKI Method
For nearly four years after I wrote this post I have continued to use flashcards to learn and have made a number of refinements to my recommendations. I summarised these points in 1: Janki Method Refined and a separate article, 2: Guide to Autodidactism/Note-taking/SRS. Open both pieces in new tabs for later reading to get a complete and nuanced picture.

This is a guide to becoming a productive programmer quickly. In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell told the w...