I hosted a RailsGirls meetup and give my first coding workshop!

So excited to write about this.  One year after building my first Rails app, I organized and presented my first coding workshop.  It's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do.

I have been kinda consumed lately with worrying and preparing for giving my first coding workshop.  I hosted ~18 coders at our local RailsGirls event for all day workshop.  I introduced the concepts of MVC and styling with CSS and the Bootstrap gem as we worked on adding functionality to a Tamagotchi - virtual pet app.  It was fun, but stressful for me.  And it was only stressful because I'm not used to being the center of attention or speaking for ~5 hours straight!

That's me! Presenting to ~18 bright (mainly women) coders.

Everyone was supportive of one another, and I really felt like we created a safe, friendly, open environment for learning about coding with Ruby on Rails.  I'm really proud of that.   I would love to do another workshop in a few months.  It's just kind of exhausting and intense to plan for 5 hours of coding content + activity.  I really had no idea how long my presentation would actually take or if folks would be bored out of their minds.

I was thinking it would be great to offer another, more low-key meetup option like a "Coffee & Code" type event where a small study group could get together for a couple hours and get help on working on their own projects or online tutorials/courses from a coach or 2.  It would take the pressure off of one person to present and host an all-day event.

Overall it was a great experience and empowering to be a room filled with bright women all interested and focused on coding!  I am, of course, thankful to work for a company that supports activities like this too!

Of course I have been neglecting blogging lately, but I have still been trying to learn new stuff- I've learned some more Angular & I've been playing around with Rails API with a Angular client-side app, but this experience really trumps anything else I've been doing otherwise!

Week's progress

Continuing to toil away this week.   Lots of frustration and thoughts of "will i ever be successful at this???", but I continue to power on.

1. Finished up Jumpstart Lab's Blogger tutorial on Tuesday
2. I worked through Envy Lab's Rails for Zombies on Wednesday and Thursday
3. I did the Railsbridge's Suggestotron tutorial WITHOUT the use of scaffolding.  In this tutorial, I build an app that you can add topics and then, upvote vote them and it displays the number of total votes.  I tried to hand write as much code as possible to help me work and get better with my stupid little errors I make in my ruby code.  I was pretty proud that I decided to do the tutorial with as little references to the tutorial as possible and I didn't use the automagical scaffolding generation.
4. I even figured out some of the 'extra credit' topics, including adding downvoting ability to the app to go along with the upvoting.  And I sorted the topics descending by the # of votes for each topic.

Don't know what I will work on tomorrow.  Start Hartl's Rails tutorial??  I was thinking of doing the Rubyslist app again, but try to figure it out a lot on my own.  So many resources to choose from!  I've been thinking about app ideas too for the future. 

Week's Updates....

Still working through Practicing Rails book...  I got side-tracked doing the basic Rubyonrails.org Getting Started Simple Blog tutorial.

I also found a Udemy course on creating a Craigslist clone using RoR that I blasted through and completed in 2 days, over NYE and New Year's day!  It didn't use any scaffolding and involved doing different things than I have in other tutorials - populating db using seeds.rb, geocode gem, creating a search function using JS, 4 models interacting with one another, etc.  It was a good tutorial and helped take some of the automagic mystery away from RoR.  I appreciated that it didn't rely on scaffolding to build out folders and files in the MVC, I feel like my understanding is getting better and better.  I think I'm going to be in good shape when I tackle Hartl's Rails tutorial soon.

My husband is going through One Month Rails before my subscription ends.  Adding RoR to his programming background is a good thing and will allow us to pair program and work on a project together.  I hope.  It's sometimes hard for me to expect him to want to learn/do more programming when he has been programming in another language/enviro all day, every day for work.

Saturday night.

coding in bed.

Here's how I spent my Saturday late night.... In bed, working on coding while reading Kehoe's learn rails guide. 

So far, I think I liked one month rails' style better for my learning style, but I'm doing the best I can!  I worked on integrating a contact form into my app using simple_forms and google_drive gems.

Thursday and Friday's progress!

I really immersed myself in the One Month Rails course for the past 2 days.  In the course, I am making a pinterest style app.  Here's what I've accomplished during the last 2 days:

• I got through setting up users with the devise gem and migrating everything successfully to Heroku.
• I styled the new user sign up and log in pages using Bootstrap 3.
• I then worked on generating the pin scaffold and connecting pins to users.
• I set up user authorizations so pins couldn't be deleted or changed by anyone other than the user that set them up.  And pins can only be seen by logged in users.
• I installed the Paperclip gem and added the ability to upload and edit images on the pins.
• Whew.

I'm on Day 25 of the curriculum, ~72% through the course.  Feeling really good with my progress.  I'm not just trying to blast through the videos and mindlessly do the actions.  I am taking thorough notes and really trying to understand everything.  I am a little shaky on understanding the migrations (how do we know what to type into those exactly to get the desired elements added to our database correctly?) and the methods in the controllers, but I know the more I do it, the more I'll understand.

Here's how it is shaping up...

Editing a pin - Can add an image and description.  Clean formatting thanks to Bootstrap 3.

Here's a saved pin with image and description!

Not sure how much I will work on it this weekend.  I am anxious to continue, but also like to spend time with my partner.  I may be away most of tomorrow on a trip and Sunday is the RailsGirls meetup.

Sunday's Progress

We went to my first RailsGirls meetup in a nearby town.  It was a presentation over MVC and HTML/CSS.  I'm slowing wrapping my brain around the idea of MVC.  I'm glad Josh could go with me.  Glad coding processes/design overlap so that he can explain things to me even though RoR is foreign to him as a C#/.NET programmer.

Looked at Learn to Program a little when I got home.  I got through another exercise in the book.  Tired.

I just found out that there is a group planning a Dev Bootcamp in Amsterdam.  Very excited and interested in this!  I hope it is (a) coming up soon and (b) that the tuition will be affordable.  It would be an amazing opportunity.

Looking forward to starting fresh this week.