Jack Kinsella's Blog, page 13

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Engaging Introductions: Capturing Your Audience’s Interest

The initial impression your blog post makes is crucial, and that’s where your introduction comes into play. Hook your readers with a captivating opening that sparks curiosity or emotion. Address their pain points or questions to establish a connection. Outline the purpose of your post and give a sneak peek into what they can expect. A well-crafted introduction sets the tone for an immersive reading experience.

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Autodidactism

I wrote a guide to autodidactism some years ago but managed to lose the original. Hereâs an earlier draft, minus images plus typos:

Link to Google Drive PDF

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...