Week 4 Day 5: Take a Breather

Major Activities of the Day: We started out today with an assignment to write a method that would take an array of names, mix them up, and spit out groups of a given size, with no names repeated in a group or in adjacent groups.  My solution went through a few iterations, but with a little input from Eugene Millerman (who had a pretty sweet solution already), I got it down to a single line.  Ready or not, here it comes:

def create_groups(students, group_size, num_groups)
  students.shuffle.cycle.each_slice(group_size).first(num_groups)
end


Yep, that's the whole thing, and it's a mouthful!  Here's how it works: First, the array of students is shuffled.  Then it gets called with the `cycle` method, which returns an Enumerator that will go through the end of the list, then loop back to the beginning, ad infinitum.  Then `each_slice(group_size)` returns a modified Enumerator which yields arrays of the size `group_size` one at a time.  Finally, `first(num_groups)` tells that Enumerator to yield an array containing the first `num_groups` arrays that it would yield.

After our usual brief blog post session, we had some free time to catch up on any work we had missed.  Since I was up to date, I worked on Code School's JavaScript Roadtrip series (which I've been working through recently), and finished the final course!  I then started working on a Fruitbot (for more info on the Fruitbot contest, see www.fruitbots.org) that I had been writing in Ruby, but now I want to do it in JavaScript.  So I spent some time on that.

After a late lunch, we headed back in for lecture, where we covered Sinatra testing with RSpec and Capybara in much greater detail.  This is seriously useful stuff, people.  I like Capybara a lot already.

Skills developed: JavaScript (for me), Sinatra testing