Wednesday.

I finished chapter 13 of the Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper. It covers Rails, Sinatra, & Ramaze.  Book is really showing it's age when the Rails version is 2.2.  :(  At least in the example Rails app, it gave me the opportunity to figure and update the old rails way to the terminology of Rails 4.2.  The intro to Sinatra was a nice bonus though.

I am thinking of moving onto Hartl's Rails Tutorial.  I want to move back into Rails learning and I want to be working with a more up-to-date book/tutorial.  I've gotten further than I thought I ever would in the Beginning Ruby book... 13 chapters, over 400 pages of Ruby code learning.  The following couple chapters of the book are on GUI-Based Desktop Application Development, Sockets, Daemons, etc.   I got the basics that I wanted to learn and I want to keep studying those basics in different ways and through building more and more applications and doing coding challenges like codewars.

Of course, I'm keeping up with doing some codewars.com challenges every day.  I am also doing at least 1 dutch lesson everyday.  I need to also learn 5-10 dutch irregular verbs and their past tenses every day too.

Monday + Tuesday

Working through Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper, just finished chapter 12 (page 345) and built a small bot app.  I like this book better than Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  They cover many of the same topics.  I've also been trying to do a couple of the ruby fundamentals coding katas at codewars every day.

I had another dutch language class on Monday night.  I am trying to study a little Dutch every day.  I need to work on pronunciation.  It's hard for me.  And it kinda sucks being in an expat class.  The instructor will quickly switch to english for explanations and they other 2 students seem to like to use English instead of focusing on trying to speak in Dutch.  I try dutch first to try to explain things in class even if I butcher it (pretty sure that 100% of the time it's spoken terribly).

Saturday

I jumped back into the Beginning Ruby book and did some reading and work.  I created my first gem... a ridiculous small gem with one method that finds all the vowels in a string and puts them into an array.

I found this site coderbyte where there are coding challenges to do using one of several languages.  I started going through the first "easy" exercises in Ruby.  You get points based on how fast you submit a working solution then you can compare to other users' answers.  It's neat to see other people's solutions and how varied they are from each other.  The easy exercises have been harder than I expected... I like the challenge though.  It forces me to go and look up things in Ruby's API or get further clarification on things with stackoverflow.

My spouse is looking to expand his code knowledge from .NET/C# and is looking into learning the MEAN stack, particularly AngularJS.  Pretty cool to be sitting around the house and he's watching tutorials on AngularJS while I'm doing coding challenges on my laptop. :)

Final pre-course work challenges finished! Foobar + temp conversion challenges.

As part of thefirehose project's pre-work course, there is a foobar challenge.  Although I know my solution needs refactoring, it's pretty cool to be able to get out a working solution for this in < 5 mins in Ruby.  I remember doing this challenge when I started coding two months ago and it took me hours and I had to *cheat* and look for hints online (I did it in jQuery instead of Ruby then).  Understanding the logic and for/while loops is so much better now!

The last challenge of the pre-course work was to make a temperature converter for C to F.  Easy.  Done in a couple minutes. The bonus 2nd part of this challenge was to allow user input (already did it for previous challenge) and make it convert both ways.  This was a little trickier because I needed to use regex to extract the integer and the unit for an input string like 32F or 101C.  But I did it.  Maybe not the prettiest solution, but it works!

So, I'm done with thefirehose project pre-course work now.  So I'm pretty much ready to go for either Tealeaf or thefirehose project bootcamps.

Thursday Progress

• Started working on an awesome site for my web portfolio.  very simple so far but bootstrap'd.  It's up on github pages.  Will continue to work on it.  Feels like an accomplishment to easily do a task like this.  Woot!  Means I've learned stuff!

• Worked through most of the Firehose Project pre-course work.  Still deciding about the online bootcamps!
• Working through Learn Ruby the Hard Way (part of the firehose project pre-course work).  On lesson 14 or so.

Wednesday's Progress

• Finished Tealeaf Prework Course!  Found the Ruby book and exercises useful.
• Jumped back into Beginning Ruby book. Finished Chapter 8, Chapter 9 and started Chapter 10 (page 253).

Progress update.

• Read as much as I could this weekend...   On the train, in bed, on the couch, at the cafe, where ever. I made it into Chapter 8 of Beginning Ruby (page 184).
• Also working through Tealeaf Academy's precourse work (Ruby review, etc) when I get bored in the Beginning Ruby book.
• Realizing I need to make a separate page to list all the tutorials and books I've complete and still have to check off to help me keep on task.  So many resources out there to get distracted by!
• Unrelated: Slowly absorbing more dutch language.  Had my second class tonight.  Need to desperately practice pronunciation.
• Still undecided on the online bootcamps - deciding on this is on the backburner until next week...  I like Tealeaf's lower price but dislike not having a mentor and the lack of connection I felt when I emailed them questions about the program and if they had any participants from the EU.  I love thefirehoseproject's mentorship opp and fast personal response to my email questions.

Friday's Progress

Finished CodeAcademy's Ruby Course!  Started up on Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby book.  I am in Chapter 3, page 91.  I just finished a basic ruby program that inputs a txt file and does a bunch of analytics on it (counting characters, words, sentences, lines, etc).

Things are going well!  Pushing as hard as I can.  Github streak is starting up again :)