Mindy's Programming Journey

Friday found me hunting and pecking around in manuals looking for functions and commands I needed to attempt previous Global Master code golf challenges. After a few hours, the hunting became tiring.  So my goal for this week became to read the Using ObjectScript manual  Today I began reading (a warm sunny day made reading a good choice).  The first five chapters are almost complete.  Lots of notes and highlights.  Tomorrow's goal is to run the manual examples to verify that I really understand what I read. There are a couple gotcha areas that I really need to test a few ways to make sure I see all the pitfalls. Feels like I'm back in school.  It's been a long time.

 Not all side roads lead to nowhere.  Sometimes the fun of an off the beaten track road leads you to new insights. While trying to decide which way to turn next in my quest to re-write the company application in Objectscript, an email from Global Masters arrived.  After guessing (incorrectly) on the Quiz (it was a health share related question I know nothing about but a chance for 15 points is worth a guess), I came across a new codeGolf challenge.  I've seen these before but since I didn't have the first clue about ObjectScript, I always skipped them. Today seemed like a good day to learn a little more ObjectScript and the challenge was interesting and not too complicated. Write a class method to accept two strings and determine if they are an anagram.  The challenge is to write it in the fewest number of characters - which usually leads to less than maintainable/human readable code.  I wasn't after the prize of fewest characters; I was on a quest to write...

 I blinked and an entire year has passed. In the words of Yoda  "Do or do not, there is no try"   What Yoda forgot to tell you is that "Do" may mean circling around a few times (aka lots of practice) to get the skill correct.  So I'm DOing and dancing in ever expanding circles that are making forward progress.  Two seasons of fundraising application use have occurred (the second is wrapping up this month). And the dance of moving to Intersystems IRIS continues.  There have several pauses in progress due to production issues that required my attention.  However with the approval of the boss, the decision to rewrite the entire application in Objectscript has been made.  As the spring season allowed, I have managed to make progress. A new server with a current Ubuntu version and Apache2 running. Cache 2017.2 running on said server. Postman unit tests conducted for each end point in the rest API (running on Cache) A smooth and quick upgrade to In...