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. :)

Friday's progress.

I did some more exercises in Shaw's Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  I'm on exercise 44: Inheritance vs. Composition.  There was a link in there to read Ruby Style Guide, so I read it too.

I started the Ruby path on Codeschool since I won a 3 month free subscription to it.  I already had done the Try Ruby and Rails for Zombies 1 tutorials.  So, I started back with Rails for Zombies 2 tutorial and I got through segment 4 of 5.  Got a little difficult for me after the third segment.  Hard to go through the exercises when you are more or less watching a video showing some rails techniques, but not actually coding through the app yourself as I thought I would be.  Videos jump around a lot.  Not sure I'm a fan.  Disappointing because I did like Rails for Zombies 1.

Free Codeschool!

Sweet!  I won 3 months of free access to Code School... so I'm going to try their Ruby track and do all the Ruby and Rails courses available.

More Progress, learning more OOP Ruby.

As I hit more advance topics in beginner ruby such as OOP, learning speed slows down drastically.  I have to slow down and absorb.  Did a little Learn Ruby the Hard Way, but kinda stalled, so switched over to reading Tealeaf Academy's Object Oriented Programming in Ruby online book.  I think these online books they have posted up for free use are good and concise little tutorials with good exercises at the end of each section. This helped me think through some concepts.  What might look like jumping around and taking a while to finish 1 book, is actually me going to other sources to figure things out, rather than keep going and not really understanding a concept.

Studied while listening to old indie music I haven't listened to in years: Of montreal, wolf parade, Tapes 'n tapes, sunset rubdown, karl blau...  It was awesome!

I am also trying to take time every day to work on my Dutch studies too.  I went to Dutch class on Monday and felt terrible because I hadn't really taken any time during the week to look over anything.  I am making it a point to go over vocab and do the online exercises every day.  It's the only way I can hope to train my ear and mouth to speak better dutch.  Class wasn't cheap, so I want to get the most out of each session.

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.

Monday's progress -updated my github pages site!

Worked the past few days on Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  Finished through exercise 31.

I mostly worked this weekend on a site to show my progress/portfolio in a better, concise way than just the blog.  I worked on my github pages site and built it into this over the weekend using HTML5, CSS3 and customized Bootstrap.

The part that took the most time was the design of the navigation at the top.  I first went with a navbar, but didn't like the look 100%.  So I switched over to the nav pills style and customized it.  So figuring out the design by building different things took the majority of my time.  I'm sure I'll keep nitpicking at it, but I like it for now.

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 :)

Thursday progress.

75% through Codeacademy's Ruby course.  Hope to Will finish tomorrow.  Could have maybe finished today, but spent some time researching online bootcamps again.  Broke my 30 day github streak by switching gears to Codeacademy. Boo.

I like the codeacademy lessons, but I miss coding in my own terminal.  It's going good, I feel like I'm getting a lot out of it since I've been working on projects for the past month.  More of a review than a first look for me.

Wednesday's Progress

I'm taking a short break from working on Rails projects to go back to learn more Ruby.  As I am gaining a better understanding of the Rails framework, I need to go back and get really solid on Ruby.  I think I'll understand it better now since I've been building stuff with Rails.  I started reading Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper (while I was getting my hair done).  I am also working through Codeacademy's Ruby course at home.  It's going good!  Definitely breezing through it so far, whew.  I'm glad to find that I've understood more Ruby than I thought.

I finished reading Practicing Rails by J. Weiss this morning.  I enjoyed it since the book is kind of like a pep talk to keep you going when you are starting out doing Rails and following tutorials...but its not worth it at its current price of 29$.  I think the price was too much for what the book offered.

I also downloaded Sublime Text 2.  I've been using Atom (free) since I started coding and originally setup my dev environment, but I want to try out what else is out there.  I customized the theme and font and some other options.  Looking forward to trying it out more.

I'm still debating the online bootcamps.  I emailed Tealeaf to see if they've had any success stories/students from the Netherlands and they didn't know of any.  That was kinda disappointing for me.  The core problem I have with the online bootcamps (besides the high cost) is getting the relevant mentorship that is going to help me get a job HERE.  I'm ambitious; I have no problem putting in the hard work and to get better at this stuff.  Yesterday, I stumbled upon a possible jr dev/internship position which I am extremely interested in, and I've applied for it... this would really be the ideal situation for me, but I will just have to wait and see.

Not coding related, but useful for my future in the Netherlands...

I started a dutch language course last night!  It's a course for expats, once a week 3hrs in class + 1hr outside class, for 20 weeks (~5months).  I'm excited.  I've been waiting for this course to begin for a few months now.

There are some really cheap, good state sponsored programs, but our visas prevent us from taking that one. The private languages schools are expensive.  But this course is still costly but cheaper than a private school.  Unfortunately, I guess they assume with highly skilled migrant visa that you'll be making really high salaries and can afford a private course (or you don't care about learning dutch and get by with English), but with only my husband working at the moment, that is not the case.

I should be up to a A2 level afterwards and then can continue to learn and prep for the Inburgerings exam - what we will eventually need to do for pursuing permanent residency in the Netherlands.  I want to get to at least a B2 level, although near fluency would be amazing.  Learning dutch should definitely help when I look for jobs here, at least I will be able to communicate somewhat.

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 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. 

Monday's Progress.

Not much to update.  No break throughs.  Lots of frustrations.  I'm just working hard and studying everyday.  Riding the cycle of feeling accomplished to feeling like the dumbest person ever.

I've been going through Jumpstart Labs Blogger Tutorial.  Spend most of the day figuring out the section on tagging.... creating Tag and Taggable models and using the Taggable model to set the relationships between Articles and Tags.  Learning about foreign keys (think I got it), but got really really hung up today on this:

def tag_list=(tags_string)
tag_names = tags_string.split(",").collect{|s| s.strip.downcase}.uniq new_or_found_tags = tag_names.collect { |name| Tag.find_or_create_by(name: name) } self.tags = new_or_found_tagsend
particularly the first line of:
def tag_list=(tags_string)
This took me hours (HOURS!) this evening/night to figure out.... never seen def method equals something in my rails work before! And it took me hours to figure out this is a setter. I think I understand it now.... since tag_list is not defined in the Article model/table/schema as an attribute it can't save the tag_list when it tries to create the new Article object. we have to define it in a method in the Article model (what we are doing above) so our tag values we input in the form when we create a new article will be saved. Lots of googling and talking about it with my husband and re-reading this part of the tutorial over and over, and I finally got it. WHEW.

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.