Days After We Started

As I've mentioned, I'm not a developer by any means. This meant I actually had to figure out how we were actually going to accomplish what we wanted to do.

First thing first: What the hell was json? What could be used to parse it? How would I go about sorting the data? Was I using the right terminology?

I didn't have a clue where to start but I had heard a lot about people starting to use Frameworks. I had bought a book on Ruby a few months ago and had trudged through some of that but I wasn't anywhere near confident with it. So a good old Google searched returned a number of results. I'd talked about it with a friend (Adam Patterson) and couldn't quite remember the name of the project he'd recommended.

I did a bunch of searches and started to take a stab at Code Igniter. I liked the framework but the REST client documentation made no sense to me. I went through a few days of just watching tutorials trying to make sense of what I wanted to do with the framework. Being new to how the framework worked out and really being a noob with PHP, it all just confused me.

What was I to do? Clearly the answer was to tweet about my frustration. Luckily Adam Patterson was listening and was willing to help. After a bit of discussion he threw some code together but it didn't work out the way intended. The problem was mostly the array that was created by using the jsondecode function. I had him sucked in, awesome. He had to figure it out the next morning and emailed me a snippet of code that worked perfectly.  After playing around with it, I was off and running with the code...so much as my limited ability could do.

Next was to play with the data provided.