Halfway through my jr dev internship.

I finished up my 6th week at my internship last week.   I'm halfway through my 3-month program.  For me, it was another busy week of working on different tasks for real project code.  I follow a similar formula for everything I build: think about what needs to be built, write a suitable feature test in Cucumber, go through each step in the feature by letting the test steps guide my coding.

I have started working through Hartl's Rails tutorial during my morning and evening train commutes (as long as I find a place to sit).  I felt that only working on it during the weekend was counter-productive since I spent a good bit of time trying to figure out what I was working on from the last time.  I was able to work through 3 chapters last week by simply doing it during my commute!  The book is great and is helping me go back over basics that I might not have fully understood when I started learning Rails.  Plus, reviewing these things while I am doing project work is really helping me think through concepts a lot better.

On Saturday, I finished the third and final week of the free online MOOC Dutch course from futurelearn & University of Groningen.  I really liked the course!  I think it was a good supplement to the in-person course I am taking.  I only wish this course had lasted longer than 3 weeks!

I went to a RailsGirls workshop on Sunday and learned about MeteorJS.  I built a simple to-do list app.  It's easy to follow and I recommend checking it out on their website.  I was super impressed with the ease to setup Meteor (1 command in terminal and it was ready to go.  No error messages - whew!)  It was also really cool how easy/quick it was to deploy it and even make the android APK for my deployed app.  Super easy.  Once I finish Hartl's Rails tutorial, I want to start learning JS and I might try building more in Meteor to get more comfortable with JS since I liked the framework.  I don't think Meteor is at the point that it is production ready since it is so new and they are still adding features.  But it is still really cool to try out

I am still taking an in-person dutch course 1x/week.  I have kinda put dutch on the back burner during the week, since I'm so focused on coding right now.  What I need most for my dutch to improve is to have a patient speaking partner.  I have asked a dutch friend to start meeting with me on the weekend to practice.  Hopefully I can make that a regular, weekly occurrence and get some noticeable improvement with my dutch.

Tuesday's update

Since last post, I wanted to build a Reddit style site.  I wanted to do it with minimal tutorial step-by-step guidance and no scaffolding magic.

I found a good resource here.  Not a bunch of code copying, I completed the bones of it and what I really found useful is the user story prompts.  I need to do that when I do my own project, keeps me from panicking :).  I even included additional changes to displaying the up/down votes and used bootstrap styling...  It includes pagination, bootstrap-sass gem, upvoting and downvoting using boolean (true/false logic) in which user has only 1 vote on a topic and can change between up/downvotes, authentication via Devise....

RedditClone Screenshot

I've been thinking a lot what my path I will continue on is going to be.  There's supposed to be a dev bootcamp in Amsterdam in March or April (maybe?).  I have no idea about the costs or if I will be invited as a participant.  That's at least 2-3 months away though.  There's a Railsgirl beginner workshop coming up at the beginning of February, I'd like to go to it, but I'm afraid I've advanced past its topics since I'm already set up a dev environment and building little beginner apps and deploying to Heroku and posting on github.

I've been thinking about signing up for an online bootcamp and I'm leaning towards Tealeaf Academy.  I've seen some blog posts online and also on reddit on folks who have succeeded with Tealeaf and gotten jobs afterwards.  The price is one of the lowest I've seen ($2500 total) and you pay in 3 different segments.  Estimated completion time for the program is 4 months.  Working on it full-time, I'd hope I could complete it in less though.  I'm definitely committed.  I've currently got a 29 day streak going on Github.  I'm working hard and struggling through some topics.

I think I'm going to look into the prep work for Tealeaf and work through it.  I think it's mostly a review, so I think I could go through it pretty quickly, then I can make a decision on the program.

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.

Tuesday's Progress

I finished Kehoe's Learn Rails Tutorial.  I was able to do the whole thing easily while my spouse was away on a trip.  He's back tomorrow, so I will probably be taking some time off during the holidays to relax, bike, and snowboard. :-)  I have a 9-day streak on GitHub.  woot!

I am happy with my progress so far this month.

Monday's progress.

With technology projects, like many other aspects of life, though it seems you’ll never get it right, and never get it done, there are moments when you can savor a sense of accomplishment. This is one of those moments. -Daniel Kehoe, Learn Rails Tutorial

Sunday's progress:

• Got mailer setup and working.
• Got site deployed to Heroku and working.
• Even though I was getting all this stuff done, troubleshooting and fixing stuff, I felt incredibly overwhelmed and confused again about controllers, views, and models.  
• Felt down because I was confused and felt like I didn't understand anything at all and felt like I hadn't learned anything in the tutorial, but just following instructions.

Today's progress:

• I got a good 4 hours of studying done at the library before it was time to go home and walk/feed the dogs.
• In that time, I re-read much of what I had just done/learned in the Learn Rails tutorial. 
• I googled A LOT.  Learning about RESTful design.  Learning about 'skinny controller, fat model.'  Looking up more about ActiveRecord, ActiveModel, ActionController & Mailer. Looking up about using render vs. redirect_to in the controller methods.
• Reading RubyDocs like "Rails routing from the outside in."
• When I got back home, I finished up the bulk of the tutorial, adding segment.io JS to create analytics via google analytics.  And pushed it to heroku and made sure it was working via checking the real-time analytics tracking.
• I feel a little less completely lost this evening.
• In the past few days, I've read over 250 pages (and re-read most of those) of the Learn Rails tutorial.  I have about 70 more pages to finish.

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.

Learn Rails Tutorial started!

I started Daniel Kehoe's Learn Rails book on Tuesday.  I'm excited to do this tutorial!  I decided to do it before starting Hartl's Rails tutorial to get more practice and because the application I will be building during the book will be suitable for a small business... it includes contact form and mailing list features.  This will be great since the first independent project I'm going to take on is making a new website for my dad's business!

I got through chaper 12, setting up my new project and getting git setup along the way, and then got stuck for hours on the dumbest mistake ever.  I'm pretty embarassed that I wasted my evening on such a silly error.  I was editing my .bashrc file and secrets.yml file in the app to setup environment variables in the bash file so they aren't revealed in the secrets.yml file.  I kept getting one of two errors:  my secret_key_base wasn't defined in the secrets.yml file and an error similar to this one: "ruby/2.1.0/psych.rb:370:in `parse': (<unknown>): could not find expected ':' while scanning a simple key at line 18 column 1 (Psych::SyntaxError)"

After systematically going through replacing variables in secrets.yml file with hard values, checking the multiple bash files on my computer for conflicts (bash_profile, bashrc, profile, zshrc, etc), I finally found the problem and felt so dumb.  When I was opening up my bash files, I was just clicking them in Finder and the default textEdit program for Mac was opening them instead of opening them in my text editor, Atom.  So, the problem was, that the textEdit program was adding formatting that couldn't be interpreted properly by my computer.  DUMB!  Once I went through them and re-did my bashrc file in Atom, it all works!

I could continue to beat myself up for making this mistake, but it is better to laugh at it and learn, and never make it again!