If a = 1 and b = nil, and you set b = a, then the value of b will be 1, because you have assigned b to have the value of a.

If a = 1 and b = 2, and you set b = a, then the value of b will also be 1, because you have assigned b to have the value of a, and this replaced the previous value of b, which was 2.

With the regular assignment operator (=), it doesn’t matter what value a variable previously had; when the variable is assigned a new…

Note: The following guides assume your development environment is already set up, including Ruby, Rails, database, version control, and deployment. For these examples, I will use PostgreSQL, GitHub, and Heroku.

Create new Ruby on Rails app

1. Create application and set database type (where appname is your app’s name and postgresql is the database type)

rails new appname --database=postgresql

2. Adjust config/database.yml and connect database

• Add the following under default (where postgres is database username and password is database password):

username: postgres
password: password
host: localhost

• Also, comment out login under production

# username: appname
# password: <%= ENV['APPNAME_DATABASE_PASSWORD'] %>

3. Navigate to the new app folder…

As I’ve gotten into mechanical keyboards recently, I’ve also been experimenting with different software that changes how the keyboard works with the computer.

One piece of software I have gotten a lot of use out of recently is: Karabiner Elements

This program does a lot: has an event viewer, allows simple remappings of keys (called “Simple Modifications”), allows importing of complex bindings (called “Complex Modifications”), allows disabling the built-in keyboard on a laptop, lets you customize how your function keys work, and stores many of these settings separately per keyboard.

But one thing it won’t do is let you create…

Over the past few months, I have fallen into a hobby that seems to complement coding very well: mechanical keyboards.

I became interested in this through Reddit, as I would occasionally come across a post from the r/mechanicalkeyboards subreddit showing a picture of a really nice mechanical keyboard someone had built.

Apparently, there was a whole world around mechanical keyboards (MKs) now. (At the time of this writing, r/mk has over 383,000 subscribers!) While I appreciated all the work some people put into customizing their MKs, at the time, I still thought it was kind of silly to spend so…

When I was first researching bootcamps, I remember reading an article that gave tips and tricks for being successful. One of the suggestions was to get an app that blocks distractions while coding. I do have a tendency to check Reddit, Facebook, the news, etc. while I’m working. I intend to just spend a minute or two, but that can quickly turn into 30 minutes or more. I figured if I want to be successful at bootcamp, it couldn’t hurt to try these apps and see how useful they are.

I checked out two of the more popular distraction-blocking apps…

As a kid, I had dabbled in programming on my TI-99/4A. I remember spending hours copying lines of code from a book into the computer, followed by a rush of excitement and pride when it was finished and I got to watch a few sprites animate on the screen. So naturally, when I graduated high school 18 years ago, I enrolled at the University of Central Florida as a Computer Science major. That was what I had planned to do, and it was what made sense.

Things don’t always go as planned though.

After the first semester, I realized I…