HabitRPG

So I was wandering around Hacker News today, and I came across something exactly what I was hoping to do last year!

Enter HabitRPG, a to-do list with a gamified twist. It has dailies, to-dos, habits (good and bad) and the ability to reward yourself. Basically, you have an avatar, with stats and experience points - things you'd expect in an RPG - and as you do tasks, dailies or good habits, you gain exp and money. With money, you can buy new costumes or pets for your avatar - very addictive things that are used to be so common all over the internet (NeoPets, that dragon egg signature thing on forums?). It's genius, because people who are attracted to such a feature will find themselves much more motivated.

So how does one motivate oneself to do it further? Social networking, of course. It integrates with Facebook - which is something I have to check to be sure, but if it does what I think it does with Facebook, you'll be able to see each other's progress and that usual peer pressure does the rest. It's kind of like how you brag to others about what you're doing - you're much more likely to follow through after!

You can also form parties, too, and take on various quests/challenges. In parties, you can see each other's progress (another form of peer pressure), and challenges involve giving yourself new tasks between you and your party that you share and do.

It's great! I'm definitely going to use this between bouts of Trello (They have a Trello board too for things they need doing, to boot.)

On another note, they need people to contribute! People to spread word of mouth, people to write, people to art, and people to code! For code, they use Angular JS  for both web and mobile (apparently, it makes it very easy to transfer between web and mobile codes.). They use Mongoose for the database and ExpressJS for their API server. Some things to look into, I'm sure if I want to contribute. It's a worthwhile effort, I think, and Angular is pretty big lately.

In the meantime, though, I'm going to go gain a few levels as I complete tasks. :D

Start of something new

With Wednesday, Metis' career day behind us, we're finished with the course - but there's tons of resources we still have access to. However, we're now fully-fledged junior developers at this point.

It's been an incredible ride; and while I've said that several times throughout the blog, it still hasn't changed one bit. I've learned a lot, and we've been taught much. At the start, I only had what I gathered from my experiences in RMXP and video game modding, and now I can make full fledged web apps, the design principles to make them be powerful, flexible and lean, the various languages and tools to build them on and the drive and resources to move on.

It's wonderous what 3 months can achieve, and I really have gotten used to the idea of how what I have now is able to create things to help people with. I can express my creativity and my desire to help others or myself through what I've learned.

Creative writing is one of my favourite pastimes, and in that regard, I've found that coding isn't too different from it. In a sense, we are creating things - we are building something as a sort of creative need within us as builders. There's many ways to tell a story, or to paint a picture, or to write code that all convey or do the same thing. The processes that we go through and the challenges we face are all very similar to one another. We have to figure out how to overcome the hurdles of burn out, how to motivate ourselves, or those moments where we feel like we can't come up with anything valuable or something people would want, or times where we think we're weaker than our peers.

In that regard, coding requires the same dedication or passion as writing. I think that's why I've fallen in love with this particular art. While creative writing will be a pastime for me, I feel that it serves me best as my tool of self expression and introspection. Code, on the other hand, is my way to really create things for others. I have a lot of projects lined up that I think of daily as I ponder about family, friends and colleagues that could use my talents to make a few of their problems easier.

Definitely, now that I walk out of thoughtbot's office as a Metis graduate, I feel like I can code a lot more challenging apps, and these challenges are things I'd be glad to tackle.

Using Carrierwave and Fog

Following up installing RMagick in my previous post, I added Carrierwave and Fog. For the most part, instructions on getting Carrierwave running with Fog are in line with what I gathered in this blog post by JavaHabit. However, there's a few things to keep in mind:

• Once you get your fog.rb generated, be sure to move it to your config/initializers folder.
• If you plan on pushing your app to heroku, don't link your secret keys within the fog.rb file, you should install the dotenv-rails gem, make a .env file, put the keys inside it, then be sure to use ENV.fetch in the fog.rb file to obtain the keys remotely. Add .env to the gitignore file.
• Restart your server. Additionally, it's best to convert the hash syntax within the fog.rb file to the newer rails style (if you use version 4).
• Common error fixes: restart the server, remove the region line, and keep the fog.rb file to the bare minimum (delete mostlines to make most things set to their defaults). Those are the most common SO answers I've found.

Basically:

Add the dotenv-rails gem in your gemfile:

gem 'dotenv-rails'

In your fog.rb file, trim it down as much as possible and make the key hashes point to an ENV.fetch of the keys you need:

CarrierWave.configure do |config| 

config.fog_credentials = {
 provider: 'AWS',
 aws_access_key_id: ENV.fetch("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID"),
 aws_secret_access_key: ENV.fetch("AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY"),
 }
 config.fog_directory = "bucketname"
 config.fog_attributes = {"Cache-Control'=>'max-age=315576000"}
end

In your .env file, make the following definitions for env variables:

AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID=accesskey 
AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY=secretaccesskey

In your gitignore file, add the uploads folder and .env to avoid uploading your images (if any) and secret keys onto github:

/public/uploads
.env

Lastly, in ImageUploader:

storage :fog

And that should set Fog up for your Carrierwave. Hope it helps!

Installing RMagick on Windows

Today while working on our project, I was facing trouble installing RMagick. It was - as expected, a windows issue, and while most guides on troubleshooting were old and out of date, a more recent Stack Overflow response (January 2014) more or less pointed out the issue was that Windows might not be supported in the more recent versions of ImageMagick with RMagick. So the solution was to use older versions when it worked, and it definitely solved my issue in installing it.

To sum up and quote the answer by Dany Khalife:

Uninstall ImageMagick and re-install a previous version that works with your Ruby setup.
This is what worked for me :

• Ruby 1.9.3
• Dev Kit 32-4.5.2
• ImageMagick 6.7.7 (i had a really hard time finding binary versions for legacy versions of ImageMagick so i guess this link will be handy for you: http://ftp.sunet.se/pub/multimedia/graphics/ImageMagick/binaries/)
• Rmagick 2.13.2

Keep in mind the version numbers! I'm running on Ruby 2.0.0 and it worked just fine. Be sure to use the following command, assuming ImageMagick was installed in C:/ :


gem install rmagick --version=2.13.2 --platform=ruby -- --with-opt-lib=c:/ImageMagick/lib --with-opt-include=c:/ImageMagick/include 

And that's all there is to it. 'bundle install' should work just as well, too for the rails project. Hope this helps!