How do you deal with coder's block?

I've kind of fallen into a trap with my Ruby work. I've been working on Dungeon Crawler for so long that I'm getting sick of it. I've had help from several friendly Rubyists (@jqr, @mileszs, @netshade, I am looking at you here) and I simply can't figure out how to make a proper redirect based on a form input.

This is extra irritating because I'm pretty sure I DO get how routing with Sinatra works, but starting a user out on one page with an input form, then redirecting that user to another page based on his input, seems to be escaping me.

I've gotten this to work in a limited capacity, when all of the logic is thrown into the

get '/input' do

method, but using a case/when statement here always uses the same logic. For example, dais_room will be north of torch_room, but vine_room will be north of dais_room, and I was always being redirected to dais_room with input "go north."

I also had a problem of simply being redirected to a white page with black text pulling the description of the room. I believe this was the method @netshade showed me for automatically creating a room without explicitly coding it, but for some reason it was not loading a view file.

Here's a full gist of what I've got, if anyone wants to give me some srs help:

Dungeon Crawler full gist

What do you guys do when you get so frustrated with a project? Do you power through, work on something else, or just take a break? I feel like since the holidays began, I've found a ton of great excuses not to code. It's Christmas Eve! It's Christmas! I just had LASIK surgery done!

But I'm sick of making excuses and I want to get back into working on a project without feeling like a gigantic dummy or just tearing my hair out because I can't figure it out. That makes sense, right?

It's not all bad news, though. @netshade and @annamul gave me The Pragmatic Programmer, a philosophical/theoretical book about coding. I really like the PragProg guys, and this book has been a lot of fun to read so far.

I think I need some way of setting goals for myself each week with coding. As in, "This week get better with using Git for source control," or "This week, get more comfortable with Javascript." Any recommendations for simple goal setting applications, or methods you've used? I use Tadalist for simple day-to-day chores and things, but that's not quite what I want. Maybe Evernote would work? I still haven't checked into that.

Either way, thanks for all your help, everyone! And Happy New Year!

Working with the Method method in Ruby

So with the help of my friend Z (also known as Chris to some, mostly just his wife) I've made some progress on Dungeon Crawler. But not much.

Namely, he showed me how to abstract my routing, so rather than having

get "/torch_room" do
  @torch_room = torch_room
  erb :torch_room
end

I have a method that automatically builds a route based on methods that already exist for rooms. Pretty awesome! I think learning to be less specific and abstracting my code is one of the most difficult things I'm learning. One of the guiding tenets of Ruby is DRY (Don't Repeat Yourself) and I really just need to be aware when I'm writing the same basic code more than once that it can probably be abstracted.

Ok, but here's my problem. I still can't figure out a way to collect input from a form, pass that input into an instance variable so that I can check it from other rooms and perform redirects based on the input itself. Does that make sense? I am absolutely trying my hardest to be clear about what I'm trying to do. Z also clued me in on a Method method but I can't figure that out, either.

Here's a gist with what I've done so far, but (FAIR WARNING) it's straight up busted:

Busted Gist

That said, I've noticed a funny thing about this problem. Bear in mind I've been wrestling with this guy off and on since my last post. (I DID do a couple of fun tutorials in between wrestling matches, mostly to keep myself limbered up) I didn't get frustrated in the usual "FUCK IT I GIVE UP" kind of way, but more in a "huh that didn't work. Ok let's try another thing. Hmm nope, that didn't work either," kind of way.

I did try some CRAZY other things, based on what my friend Miles told me about last time I posted about this problem (said crazy things mostly involved working with hashes, trying to convert hashes to strings, etc. Does that work? PROBABLY, I DON'T KNOW!) with minimal success.

I think this is how Daniel-san felt when he realized the entire time he thought he was washing Mr. Miyagi's car, he was actually learning karate.

Trouble with Ruby form methods

I'm still working with my Dungeon Crawler Sinatra app. Believe it or not, I have a problem. I'm trying to get a simple form method working to allow a user to move from one room to another by typing in the direction he wants to move and then hitting 'Submit'. So good so far, right?

Here's a link to a gist of the code I've got so far:

Working with form methods

The second file I posted in the gist is code that works, but I'm looking for a cleaner way of manipulating the information collected from the form method. Does that make sense? This is probably easy enough to do, and @jqr gave me some help with it last week, but I can't figure out how to make these form methods behave.

On a side note, do you have a problem with getting distracted with new ideas for projects when you're in the middle of a project? This seems to happen to me all the time, and I've been handling it by saving as much as I can think of in a Google Doc. I wonder how other programmers handle this? Do you just write things down in a notebook? I've been thinking about creating a template to use for these project ideas, just to keep my thoughts a bit more organized. If any of you have a template like this, or suggestions on what would be key features, I'd love to hear them.

I actually think a simple drawing application that allows me to add notes and save to the cloud would be ideal, but I haven't heard of anything like this.

More work on Dungeon Crawler

So my current project is coming along pretty well. I had an "AHA!" moment the other day (partly thanks to @jqr's hint about how to interpret gets.chomp) when I realized I need to use a form to collect that data. Once I've actually GOT some input from a user, it's easy enough to manipulate that information and make things happen.

I've drawn out the map of the entire dungeon (to help with actually laying it out when coding) and I've written methods and routes for all the rooms. Currently I'm loading a separate view for each room, since I eventually plan to have hand-drawn images representing the rooms themselves (which get updated when things happen, such as chests are opened, items discovered or moved, etc) so I thought this was the best way to handle it.

I've thought of ways to do the entire dungeon with a single view file and simply loading different information when the player makes certain choices, but for now I'm leaving that for a refactoring. Strangely enough, I think the hardest part of doing it this way would be figuring out a method for changing the image that represents the room, not the actual routing or the get method that would change the room. Strange!

I'm also not worrying about the individual features of rooms just yet, such as locked doors, traps, monsters and so on. My immediate goal is to be able to move throughout the entire dungeon, making sure all the routing works correctly and that you can't move into a room you shouldn't be able to.

Sinatra has proved a lot of fun to work with, in addition to being incredibly simple. It's kind of fun to have to do my own routing, too.

Also, I think it's important to name a project, so I'm calling this one Dungeon Crawler. (This was always the name of this project, even when it just lived in a Terminal window, but I'm not sure if I've mentioned that here or not)

Finally, I learned a great trick. I'd originally named my .rb file "dungeon_crawler.rb" and it quickly became tedious to type "ruby dungeon_crawler.rb" in the Terminal every time I make a change and have to reboot Sinatra, so I renamed it to "dc.rb". Much less tedious! My guess is that coders learn tons of tricks like this over the years.

Making a web game with Ruby

Tonight I sat down to work through a bit more of Learn Ruby the Hard way (seriously, I'm on lesson 47 out of 52, I really should just finish it) but it didn't take long for me to get antsy to work on an actual program. Here's my current idea:

Building on AAN and Skyrim Stories, I want to take the dungeon crawler I made back in the summer, add some "awesome" hand-drawn graphics, and make it playable online. So far I'm picturing this as a Sinatra app, since it's pretty small and I won't need a database, and I can use Yaml for room descriptions. I've thought about ways to display different graphics for rooms when certain events happen, and I need to figure out how to take input from a user when an application is running on the web.

How do you collect information from a user, manipulate it, and trigger other functions based on the input when an application is running on the web? I'm unclear as to what the web equivalent of input = gets.chomp() is.

This project is largely just an excuse to take code I've already written (for the most part, it'll have to be refactored a bit for the web) and get more comfortable with getting a Ruby application to run on the internet. On top of that, I'm big into video games myself, and I'd love to have a hand in making games. Ruby probably isn't the best choice for making a game, but whatever!

Random Video Game Name Generator with Ruby

I've been working with a LOT of Javascript lately. And when I say "working with," what I mean is "finding scripts that will do what I want them to do and modifying as necessary." Wait, isn't this supposed to be a Ruby on Rails blog? What happened!?

I got back to work on my random video game name generator tonight. I basically wanted to style it a bit and find a way so that it would generate a new phrase whenever the page is reloaded and then provide a link to reload the page. Pretty easy to do with a Javascript code, but I'm not a huge fan of reloading the entire thing just to reload this bit of text. Probably a better way to handle this, right? Maybe an Ajax call? What do you guys suggest? This works but I don't like the look of it, I guess.

Anyway, here's a link to the app on Heroku:

Random Video Game Name Generator

I wanted to accomplish a few things with this project. First off, build a random name generator with Ruby, and then figure out how you run that code on the web. This was largely a matter of learning Sinatra, and when I say "learning," I mean reading a tutorial and talking to @jqr about it for a few minutes. Sinatra is like SO easy.

I've got plans for how I could expand it (don't I always? Other coders have this problem too, right?) such as allowing users to save names they especially like, then enter a short description of what the game would be like. Viewers could also look at games that had been saved, perhaps vote on them, look at most popular games, etc, etc.

I think it's getting easier for me to think about WHAT applications COULD do, now that I know a bit more about HOW they're built. That makes sense, right?

More work on Skyrim Stories

Today I finished up Skyrim Stories. If you'll recall, last time I posted about this project, I was looking for a way to strip out #skyrimstories from the posted tweets as well as a way to make the usernames into links to that poster's Twitter account.

My friend Matt sent me to W3 Schools to learn how to use string replace with Javascript. Took me a minute to figure out how this worked until I realized I needed to call a string replace method on the strings BEFORE they were collected into an array.

I was able to use Twitter Anywhere to make usernames into links. Plus it's got a slick hover card feature with a +Follow button. This API is easy to understand and did exactly what I wanted done plus a few extra things.

For the most part I think I'm done with this project now. I might tweak it a bit here and there, but I think it's pretty solid for what it does. And it's time for me to get back into some Ruby work, anyway.