Jewel's Audio Memory Game

An old friend of mine, Vic Douse, has a daughter, Jewel. She loves Disney, balloons, and some video games/apps. She has autism.

Vic is an Oracle DBA during the day, but at night, he has been very active in the autism community on PEI, serving as president of the Autism Society for years. (He won a Queen's Diamond Jubilee medal for his contributions).

Last winter, he started tinkering around with an Android app, despite not coding for years. The result is a simple memory/match game. The UX is... basic. But that's not the point: the point is that Jewel likes to play it. It helps her with her vocabulary.

So, check out Jewel's Audio Memory Game on the Play Store. It's free with no ads. Vic is delighted with each download, so give it a go. It's actually fun in a nostalgic way. My personal best for the 4x4 grid is 36 seconds, no doubt based on lucky strikes.

I Just Want A Foothold Example In.... Ruby

I've participated in a few paired coding sessions this year (such as Legacy Code Retreat and Global Day of Coderetreat), and I've experienced the pain of setting up an environment for a new language. It's not necessarily rocket surgery, but for a newbie, it's brutal.

Recently, I've been interested in trying out Ruby (I've always reached for either Groovy or Python first, but after meeting many, many sharp peeps who use it, it's time). To get started, I looked around on the web, but examples seem to jump from code snippets to full frameworks with little in between.

What I really want (for all languages) is a foothold: a simple project that has the usual aspects (code organization, unit-tests, automated build) laid out in an idiomatic way.

In case it helps anyone, I've posted my attempt at a foothold: War-O in Ruby, as a contribution to PEI Devs. It's a work-in-progress, and I'm still a newbie, so feedback is welcome.