I finally finished Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby this morning! w00t! The second half of that book was pretty hard and above my head, but I powered through.
I felt it was a good experience for me to read POODR at my level (7 months of coding experience). I got exposed to new concepts in basic OOD and just tried to let them 'wash over me' at this point even if I had poor grasp on what they really mean. I'm not sure if it would have been productive to attempt this book earlier than I did. I know I've gotten something out of it this first read, but can't wait for the next time I read it. I'm going to go ahead and put on my calendar to re-read POODR again in 2-3 months. It will be interesting to see how more I can understand or, at least, see what starts to sink in through re-reading it? :-)
I also listened to the second part of Sandi's interview on the CodeNewbies podcast. The parts of her interview I really enjoyed was when she spoke of only comparing yourself to yourself (and no one else) when you are judging your progress and learning. And that maybe we all should take a little breather from being so connected and online all the time... I believe in that too. It's one thing that I miss about living in the US and taking camping trips to very rural areas... where there is no way to access the internet because there's no service. It forces you to take a brief sabbatical from not only the internet but also tv and media in general. Frankly, I've been feeling a bit mentally overdrawn lately and can't wait to finally be on a vacation in a couple months. Being completely cut off from the internet and media for a week is one of the main reasons that I'm really looking forward to my vacation.
I've also been tackling the RubyKoans tasks. It's kinda addicting and most of the exercises can be completed pretty quickly. There are 282 TDD oriented tasks to complete in the program. In the past week, I've worked on/off during my commute and I've completed 216 out of the 282. I think they are fun, but I also like testing, and I'm comfortable with it.
Since I've been doing the RubyKoans, I'm rocking a 24 day streak on GitHub! I know that doesn't means anything to anyone else, but it means something to me.... I'm coding something I find meaningful, even if small, everyday.
Slowly getting through the Treehouse jQuery exercises. I find it harder to get through the treehouse stuff since it is all video-based. It's just not as convenient to do when I have time (that is mainly, on the train, during my commute), since I would have to remember to download the videos beforehand. I just have to accept I will be going through their lessons at a slower rate. I will keep working through the lessons when I have time.
Next up, I'm going to tackle learning SQL. And for reading, I'm planning on starting Eloquent Ruby. And hopefully finding some time on the weekends to collaborate on a Rails API / ReactJS app...
