More Boris Biking
Today I pretty much just worked on the Boris Bike project I talked about yesterday. I had managed to get quite far yesterday but hit a stumbling block. This morning I decided that I wanted to start again from the beginning to cement my understanding of the work we had done. This was really useful and did help me push on a little further than I had got before. In the afternoon we paired up (or in our case today three’d up?) to work on it together. As one of the trio was further behind, we started from there, so again I got to work on it and really make sure I knew what I was doing.
Working as a three was really helpful, often you make little mistakes that mean everything stops working, and it is really hard to spot them when you are writing the code. Having one or two people watching over your work means that these little errors are spotted and fixed quicker. It also means when you get stuck you can work together to figure it our. Three brains are better than one! We did get stuck on a certain part of the challenge for a little while, but together we managed to figure out how to solve it.
We are fairly near the end of the challenge now, although step 21 of 22 is basically do everything you just did again so it may take a little while to actually complete!
One of the biggest things I think I improved on today is taking a User Story and breaking it out into Objects and Messages and using that to plan my code. I also Feature Tested a lot more by opening IRB and trying what I wanted. Yesterday was the first time I had done this, and honestly it seemed a bit pointless, you are pretty much guaranteed an error and it’ll be a similar error to if you just wrote a test and RSpec’d. However today starting again I saw that there was real value to it, it does help with the planning knowing how it would work in a live environment.
Outside of Boris Bikes, I also did one of the practicals suggested by our coach Eddie. The task was to design a process flow for TDD. I have created a flow chart quickly to show how I think it would look, although I think this will be draft 1, I will look over it again tomorrow!
It was the 30th Anniversary of the World Wide Web last week, which got me thinking about not only how far it had come, but also how amazing an invention it actually is. The ambition from Sir Tim Berners-Lee to create such a thing is incredible. 30 years isn’t a really long time, yet things have changed so much, to the point where we are now pretty much all dependant on the internet, and the World Wide Web being most of our portals too it.
Something I found really interesting was this AI tech created by Nvidia called GauGAN. It really is amazing what computers can do now days. They used a neural network to train the AI by feeding it millions of pictures from Flickr, and from that it can turn basic MS Paint style drawings into photo-realistic images. Currently it is running on Nvidias own powerful computer which means it can render the image instantly, however they hope with a few modifications they could get it working on any computer, with only a short render time! It is really amazing, if not slightly worrying, soon it’s going to be very difficult to actually tell what is real and what has been created by an AI somewhere!
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