I made it! Job contract signed!

Very excited to announce... I signed a job contract!  I was able to go from a code nobody to signing a job contract for a full-on developer position in 5 months.  No $30,000 dev bootcamp necessary.  Just self-teaching with online tutorials and scoring a jr. dev internship.  Seriously, that's crazy, right?

As of May 1, my title will officially be Software Developer. :-)  I am staying on at the company where I am doing my jr. developer internship.

If I can make it, I don't see why anyone else out there can.  I started flirting with the idea of trying to become a web developer in November.  I started reading some blogs from others that found jobs as jr. devs after self-studying for 6-8 months and got motivated.

There were 2 big obstacles to getting a job I saw when I started out learning to code... 

• Living in another country and not speaking much of the native language. (How am I supposed to find a job or internship then?)
• No dev bootcamps nearby. (I almost considered doing an online bootcamp....)

I didn't let these worries deter me.  Here's my milestones on my journey to get a developer job:

• On November 13, I successfully battled homebrew and xcode error messages and installed Ruby and Rails and a text editor.
• On November 26, I created a github account.  I didn't really understand the git process at all.
• On December 16, I finished my first Rails app - One Month Rails' Pinterest clone.  I kept working through every free online rails tutorial I could find online.  I started the precouse work for 2 different online bootcamps - Tea leaf & Firehose project.  I was considering doing one of those.  
• On January 13,  I applied for a couple jr developer internships.  I almost didn't.  Some of them were posted in Dutch.  I didn't think I qualified after only doing some online tutorials for ruby and rails for the past month.  And, I definitely didn't think I was qualified when I don't speak Dutch well.  My husband convinced me to just apply and the worse they could say is 'No' or flat out ignore me.  So I did.  Caveat:   There were no positions in my current city.  So I applied in other cities within commuting distance.  I was willing to commute ~3 hrs roundtrip from Den Haag to Amsterdam every single day.  I still commute.  It's freakin' tough but I've gotten used to it.  If I get a decent seat on the train, I pull out the MacBook and work on code stuff for work or work on Hartl's RailsTutorial. 
• On February 9, I started a jr. developer internship (lots of struggling with tasks at work and reading Hartl's Rails Tutorial during my personal time happening for the next few months).
• On April 14, I signed a contract as a full-time software developer!

So that's 5 months from the time I installed Ruby and Rails to I signed my job contract!

I still have a lot to learn.  I am learning something new everyday.  Some days I feel like I'm drowning and some days I feel like a coding champion.  I truly enjoy coding.  I'm kinda shocked sometimes that I do as much as I do.  I think about coding and the coding community all the time.  I never felt that way in my previous career.

I am so excited for the future.  I can't wait to see where I'm at in 3-6 months from now.

Week 7 and RailsGirls Coaching!

I finished week 7 of my dev internship.  What a busy week... LOTS of coding, a little dutch practice and a RailsGirls event!

At my internship, I worked on some new features for one of the projects.  One of the main things I worked on last week was adding a form that was tied to other model inside the view of another.  I have had to do this once before and it was definitely tricky for me to wrap my head around how to do this.  In the beginner tutorials, it's easy... You never add a form for another model inside some other view, you put a form in the view of that model and use a simple form_for tag with your instance variable correctly defined and it's easy.  I figured out most of the solution on my own and was proud of that.  I found this blog post helpful in figuring it out and also helping me understand using form_for and form_tag better.

On Friday evening and all day Saturday, I coached at my first RailsGirls event in Utrecht.  I was definitely nervous about coaching since I feel like a huge beginner myself most of the time.  I was worried I would be useless to my students.  Luckily that was not the case.  Coaching helped me realize that I have learned a lot about coding and rails in a few short months.  I was able to help students get their dev environments setup on their machine... even a windows machine (eek!).

What I wasn't expecting was how emotional the event would be.  There was several other coaches that shared their stories of getting into coding, many taking their first steps at a RailsGirls workshop just like this one.  It was also humbling to hear the story of some of my students who are eager to learn coding so that they can change their careers and better their lives despite difficult situations.  It was pretty inspiring.  What caught me off-guard was hearing that I am an inspiration to them.  I guess I never thought of my journey as being able to inspire someone else or being that impressive.  I know since November I have studied and coded nearly every day.  And I struggle to improve my dutch language.  But I am very lucky to have a partner that supports me and allows me to take risks like changing my career.  I am impossibly hard on myself and think that I should know more than I do at this point in my learning.  I do recognize how hard I have worked and continue to work towards my goal of being a Rails developer and, even though, I work as a jr dev intern right now, I don't consider myself successful in my goal until I am a full-fledged developer with a real salary and leave interning behind.  Hopefully in a few weeks that will be the case.

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 :)

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.

Week's Progress

I started reading Practicing Rails by Justin Weiss.  Kinda pricey ebook and I'm not convinced it was worth the price so far.

I started working on (and deployed to Heroku) a site for a small machining business.  This is my first solo project I've done without following a tutorial (even though I used my past tutorials as references).

The big features of this project are:

1. Creation of a contact form that emails site owner directly when a visitor sends a contact request.  No database- it is similar to the app I built during the Learn Rails tutorial.  The contact form uses ActiveModel class.
2. Utilized Bootstrap theme template for the design.  This was the first time I've tried to adapt and customize a pre-designed template for a Rails project.  Definitely had its frustrating moments!

Of course, during the process, there were little issues that came up and required troubleshooting, but I got it all fixed and working!

What I learned during this process was that I need to work on planning work and creating sketches of the pages I'm making so I keep myself limited to one task at a time and not spread out and skipping around from task to task.    This mainly happened when I added the bootstrap features and started adding the div classes to each individual view for the bootstrap template design.

Oh, and my github streak is up to 13 days!   My understanding is better of Rails framework.  Thinking of how things go together in MVC is going better for me.  I'm pleased with that.

Goals for next week:

• I'm going to keep reading Practicing Rails.  Try to finish this week.
• Work on a personal website for myself.

Goals for January:

• Hartl's Rail Tutorial!
• Read Easy ActiveRecord for Rails Developers

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.

My One Month Rails "Pinteresting" App is finished! Woot!

Over the weekend, I didn't do much coding.  I did make it to the Railsgirl meetup and learned some stuff on JS (specifically Coffeescript) and Associations.

So far this current week, I've been busy working away at my Pinteresting app in One Month Rails.  I've done a ton in the past two days to get it finished!

• Utilized the jQuery Masonry gem so that images move around (with transitions) to fit the page width.  Oh... did I mention that since I built it with bootstrap, it will look great on tablets and mobile devices? ;-)
• Updated styling for displaying single pins on a page.
• Added Edit, Delete, and Back icon using bootstrap's Glyphicons.
• Changed up the root route so that all pins are displayed on homepage.
• Updated pins controller to change how the pins are ordered.
• Added pagination using will_paginate gem and limited number of pins displayed on a page to 8.
• Added user names and subsequent validations.
• Yay!

I started it less than 2 weeks ago and I can't believe that I've finished it.  I've learned a lot and can't wait to start the next RoR project (Hartl's Rails Tutorial)! Edit:  I've decided to do Daniel Kehoe's Learn Ruby on Rails first.  In that I will make a web app suitable for a small business, which will be great, since I want to do this for my dad's biz!  I want to redo my dad's business's website.  It's in terrible shape and needs help, and then I can also add it to my portfolio.

Of course, the Pinteresting app didn't always go smoothly and I used google and stack overflow to troubleshoot and fix problems.  My last issue was relating to a precompiling issue in my production environment.  After I finished the build today, I went back and jazzed up the css styling.  I added a background image to the jumbotron on the main page.  It was looking fine in development on my local host, but in production on heroku, it wasn't showing up and was giving a 404 not found error for the image.  I looked on stack overflow and found that others have had this issue too!  I followed some advice and it works now!

So freaking proud of myself!

Snazzy.

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.

Progress Update for last friday and the weekend....

Last Friday:

• Worked through Day 2 - 6 of One Month Rails tutorial.  I created my new project folder in rails, created a new home page, & setup the new root path in routes.rb file.  
• I did get bogged down a bit with section on Git.  The tutorial was spot on, no problems with it, but I decided to go back into a project that I had already added to github but hadn't tracked in git locally and made a mess of it!  After tooling around for an 1.5 hr I finally got it sorted.  And, in the process, I went through a couple of git tutorials and lots of searching on stackoverflow.
• Also, in browsing twitter feed, I found out about Meteor and started looking into it.  It seems really cool and I want to check it out further.  I dl'd it and started going through their intro tutorial before I got too tired to concentrate anymore for the night.  Will look at it again soon.

The Weekend:

• No progress made.  I took the weekend off.  I spent time with my partner.  On Sunday, we took the train down to Brussels, Belgium to go to the big Christmas market there.

Brussels!

Getting into a weekly routine.

Lately, I'm trying to establish a good weekday routine.  I like working at home, but feel less productive here and more distracted with the dogs around.

These two can be very distracting to have around.

So, I've been biking down to the main library.  I like it there.  Usually pretty peaceful.  I can get a solid block of time of studying in every day.  Only thing that I dislike is that bathroom isn't free to use!  But, still cheaper than going to coffee shop.  I make my own coffee and bring it with me.

Today, I finished up RubyMonk as best as I could.  I got through all the lessons/exercises and finished all the problems except for 3 of the 16.  I'm like 96% done.  I'm just stuck on a couple and staring at them does not help me understand them better.  I'm not giving up on them or Pine's Learn to Program book, just taking a little break from them and will come back to them when I get a little more experience under my belt.

I'm very itchy to do something more tangible with my coding than these CS brain teaser coding challenges I've been doing... I want to really build my first application!  So, I went ahead and signed up for One Month Rails.  I found a discount code and it was only $74 instead of $99.  Very,  very excited about this!  I went through the day 1 lessons tonight and will soldier on with this tomorrow.  If anyone is interested, here is a link to the discounted price.

I can't believe I've been coding for 3 weeks.  I'm looking forward to see what my progress brings in the rest of this month.

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.

Tuesday 11/25...

Went through a couple more Epicodus exercises, but got stuck on some of the exercises.  I got through the leap year exercise, learning how to use chai.js and mocha.js for writing and testing specs and then refractoring my code.

Learning to use Chai.JS and Mocha.JS for spec testing in BDD.

But on the following independent exercises, I felt too challenged without any support - I know the online course is drawn from the in-class materials and I felt without the in-class support, the independent assignments were a good bit above the examples that were illustrated.

So...I'm really proud of my progress in HTML, CSS, and JS over the last 2 weeks, but.... instead of spending a lot of time to figure out javascript challenge exercises on my own, I'm going to go ahead and switch gears to Ruby.  Getting into Ruby and Ruby on Rails is my real goal, so I'm going for it.  The basis of knowledge I learned in these other languages will be useful and help me move quickly into learning the new.

I started reading Chris Pine's Learn to Program book.  I read the first 4 or so chapters tonight.  Reads well and easy to understand.  I'm hoping to get through most of the book this week.

Ping Pong Test (aka FizzBuzz Test)

I figured out the ping pong test!  Feeling good with my progress.  Oddly, I got the loops and if/else if statements figured out pretty quick, but what tripped me up the most was figuring out how to get my integers listed properly into my bulleted list.  The solution was so easy once I got that bit finally fixed in my head!

My final solution. 

Here's more info on the Ping Pong test (aka Fizz Buzz), apparently it's a popular interview question:  Why Can't Programmers.. Program?  Really...199 out of 200 programmers can't figure it out?  Maybe my odds are better than I thought then? :-)

I also did a couple lessons on BDD/TDD process.  Happy with today's progress.

Weekend Progress.

Finished up lessons on looping w/ forEach and for loops.  Got a little stuck on one of the looping exercises:

• Go back to your page where it would pop up an alert every time you clicked an element and say what kind of tag it was. Refactor your JavaScript for this page to use a loop.

But I slept on it last night and figured out the solution in only a couple minutes this morning!  Whee!  Then finished up the section on debugging, luckily already practicing some of these techniques in my practice exercises.

Tomorrow I will do the next exercise, the Ping-Pong challenge, and then dive into behavior driven development (BDD)!  Yay!

Friday 11/21

Not too much progress today.  Just very fatigued and brain fog, that made it hard to follow/think through new concepts.  I had to keep watching and watching clips again for anything to sink in.  Oh well, everyone has their off days.

I did get through the introduction of arrays and looping in javascript.  Getting closer to closer to the section on Ruby.

I'm feeling reasonable about the progress I've made this week.

Thursday, 11/20

Another day, more time spent learning/practicing on jQuery.

Learning about branching, if/else criteria, truthy/falsey... Watching epicodus lessons and working through the coding exercises.