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.
