I incurred a slight problem while working on my Sinatra Portfolio Project. My project was a clearinghouse for running events in my local area. Event organizers could signup and then publish running events to my list. An event could have multiple races ( 5K, 10K, half-marathon, etc). Organizers would be able to choose races from a set of check-boxes. Selected races go into an array, which I planned to store in my database as part of my record of each event. I found that many relational database management systems allow you to store arrays in their databases, but SQLite is not one of them.
I am a contemporary of many of Avi’s coding heroes. I’m 5 years younger than Adele Goldberg of Xerox’s PARC fame, 5 years older than Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the HTTP protocol. Roy Fielding, the inventor of the RESTful architectural style is a mere boy at 15 years my junior. I could have been in on the ground floor of something really big if only I had continued to pursue computer programming after my first couple of classes in 1970. Though I had a liking and an affinity for computer programming, two things stood between me and computing fame. Firstly, Goldberg, Fielding, Berners-Lee and the others were smart, really, really smart. And I was not. Secondly, the process of coding was hellishly hard.
My first problem was psychological. I was a year into Learn.verified and about 2/3 of the way through the lessons and still had not started my CLI gem project. I was letting the perfect become the enemy of the good. I wanted nothing less than a masterpiece, a Mona Lisa or a Sistine Chapel. C’mon, Hal. You’re not DaVinci, and you’re not Michaelangelo. I needed to follow the wisdom of that great philosopher, Bo Jackson, who said, “Just do it!”. Or that other great philosopher, Eddie Van Halen, “Might as well jump. Go ahead and jump. Jump!”
No, not the time when I predicted that Hillary would handily beat Donald Trump for the presidency. Oh, sure, she was vastly more qualified. She had been a part of two very successful administrations and been a productive senator in her own right. But I failed to measure the breadth and depth of “Hillary hate” in this country. That, coupled with the large number of people who felt left out of the 7 year steady economic recovery from near total financial collapse, was enough to overcome the hijinx of an amoral narcissist that makes fun of women’s looks, the war record of captured American heroes, and the involuntary spastic movements of the physically challenged. Who knew?
My name is Hal Fields. I do not fit the normal profile of a Flatiron coder. (I know, what does normal even mean, anyway?) I am 68 years old. My wife of 44 years and I raised 3 really cool kids. And those kids have given us 5 grandchildren. I’m finishing 33 years at my current job, automobile assembly line worker for General Motors.