I wanted to learn more about what AWS is and what benefits it can have for a developer. AWS or Amazon Web Services is a cloud platform offering multiple services including computing power, database storage, content delivery. All of these services are available on demand as a service which you pay for as you use them. This makes scaling your application or business a lot easier than a self managed local infrastructure. Let’s look at a few great things that AWS offers:

I am writing this blog post because I wanted to learn more about test automation. Automation is the use of a software tool to run repetable tests against an application. We will be looking at how we can use the Selenium WebDriver to create automated tests but first lets look at why we should automate tests…

Create an instance of SQL Server Express 2012 on a cloud provider (AWS, Azure, etc.). Attach the AdventureWorksLT2012 database (which can be found on CodePlex).  The first step I took was to create an Azure account with Microsoft. I then searched the marketplace on Azure for SQL Server Express 2012. I then deployed the Virtual Machine running SQL Server Express 2012. I then used the SQL Database tool built into Azure to connect a sample database containing the AdventureWorks2012 data. I followed along the tutorials in Microsoft’s documentation to figure out exactly how to do this. Now that I have my server up and running it is time to connect to the database and run queries. One issue I was running into was finding a good tool to run SQL queries from my Macbook. I tried RazorSQL but after spending an hour trying to troubleshoot the connection with no help from the error messages. I decided to use a different tool called SQLPro after downloading and launching SQLPro I knew what my problem was… I was doing everything right I was just using the wrong password to connect. Now that I have everything connected I can start running queries. Author some SQL queries against this database, demonstrating knowledge of several of the following: joins, grouping, window functions, common table expressions, etc.  Also, author some queries against the system tables to bring back some information about the SQL Server instance or the AdventureWorksLT2012 database.   Please provide the queries and results for the below:

In this part of the blog post we are going to use ngResource to make calls to our rails API. (Make sure you have completed the first three parts or this is not going to work.) Lets get started by first wiring up our state(‘books’) to our database so that we can see all the books we have stored in our database. To do this we will need to create a factory in the following new file app/assets/javascripts/angular-app/models/book.js:

Things are going to start getting more complicated so take your time and go slow through these next few steps. We are going to start by creating routes using ui.router. Lets first remove the default text we created in app/views/application/index.html.erb and replace it with:

In part 2 of this blog post we are going to connect AngularJS to our rails API. Lets get started by first adding the bower-rails gem to our gemfile.

This will be the first in a series of blog posts as I build my final project for Learn.co. I am going to SPA(single page application) that allows teachers to keep track of the many books they have in their classroom library. This will be similar to the Sinatra Library I built earlier this year except it will be more adapted for the classroom use by teachers. We will be communicating to a Rails backend using a JSON API. To get this started I will be following along with a fellow classmates blog which is really great and explains in detail how to do this. I encourage you to check it out if you get stuck like I did. 4-Part Series on Creating an Angular.JS App with Rails restfulAPI

I have been learning so much over the last few weeks. Last weekend I was able to finish building my Task Manager application using ruby on rails. Now I will be adding some additional features using JQuery and converting my rails backend into an API that will communicate with my JQuery front end. This project is another assesment for Learn.co. Here are the requirements for these changes:

Today I will be starting to build my first Rails application completely from scratch. I have been excited to start this project because just like the home library I will be building something I can actually use. For this project I am going to build a team task/project manager that my team at my current job can keep track of to use of current projects and make sure nothing slips past the cracks. This project will also fulfill the requirements for my third assesment for Learn.co. The requirements for this project are the following:

I have been learning a lot over the last few months about ORMs, Active Record, Rack, and Sinatra. I am now ready to build my very own Sinatra project. This will be my second project in the Flatiron Learn cirriculum. The requirements for this project are as follows:

As part of the Learn.co cirriculum we are required to take assesments that consist of putting together what we have learned in the lessons to build a project of our choice that meets the requirements specified. My first project was to build a CLI Ruby Gem with the following specifications:

This is my first blog post on my GitHub Pages website. I will be documenting my learning experiences as I gain the neccessary skills to become a Software Engineer and move back into the tech industry. I am currently an accountant and miss working with technology like i did previously as a Technical Analyst for a software company. I have been trying to teach my self to code for the last few years but have been to busy with my college education but now that I have graduated I decided to take things seriously and learn to code with the help of the Flatiron School in NYC. I am participating in their first cohort of Learn.co a remote learning experience. I love what I have learned so far and can’t wait to share my education experience here.