I hosted a RailsGirls meetup and give my first coding workshop!

So excited to write about this.  One year after building my first Rails app, I organized and presented my first coding workshop.  It's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do.

I have been kinda consumed lately with worrying and preparing for giving my first coding workshop.  I hosted ~18 coders at our local RailsGirls event for all day workshop.  I introduced the concepts of MVC and styling with CSS and the Bootstrap gem as we worked on adding functionality to a Tamagotchi - virtual pet app.  It was fun, but stressful for me.  And it was only stressful because I'm not used to being the center of attention or speaking for ~5 hours straight!

That's me! Presenting to ~18 bright (mainly women) coders.

Everyone was supportive of one another, and I really felt like we created a safe, friendly, open environment for learning about coding with Ruby on Rails.  I'm really proud of that.   I would love to do another workshop in a few months.  It's just kind of exhausting and intense to plan for 5 hours of coding content + activity.  I really had no idea how long my presentation would actually take or if folks would be bored out of their minds.

I was thinking it would be great to offer another, more low-key meetup option like a "Coffee & Code" type event where a small study group could get together for a couple hours and get help on working on their own projects or online tutorials/courses from a coach or 2.  It would take the pressure off of one person to present and host an all-day event.

Overall it was a great experience and empowering to be a room filled with bright women all interested and focused on coding!  I am, of course, thankful to work for a company that supports activities like this too!

Of course I have been neglecting blogging lately, but I have still been trying to learn new stuff- I've learned some more Angular & I've been playing around with Rails API with a Angular client-side app, but this experience really trumps anything else I've been doing otherwise!

Finished POODR!

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...

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.