Major Activities of the Day: We began today with some challenging programming problems that focused on working with strings. We went over the Sinatra & ORM challenge from the weekend, and I learned some useful tips for querying databases. Essentially, databases are the major bottleneck for applications (since they're handing massive amounts of data), and writing efficient methods for gathering information while firing fewer SQL queries can make a major difference in application performance. It's also important not to load objects unnecessarily, since object load time is a significant performance bottleneck.
Today's Rails lecture covered authentication with Bcrypt. It's really important, but as Avi pointed out, once you understand it, you don't want to create it, because there's so much room to make mistakes. Because of this, it's generally best to use Ruby gems to take care of authentication for you, so you don't miss something by accident. The current industry standard is a gem called Devise, which is apparently crazy complicated and takes a long time to figure out, but is still better than building it yourself.
He also showed us how to add Bootstrap and set up the app he's been working on over the past few lectures (a simple blogging platform) to have a decent frontend.
In the late afternoon, we had an assignment to create a very basic Ebay clone. There were 98 RSpec specifications, so lots to do, and it was homework as well.
It really hit me today how we've begun to move into the world of the web. We're moving quickly, and understanding how the ideas of basic programming translate into an online arena.
Skills learned: Noticing potential performance bottlenecks, Rails CRUD apps
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