6 months into programming.

I'm 6 months into the world of ruby and coding.  I'm still chugging along, trying to improve a little every single day.  I try to write some code everyday.  If I don't do that, I'm at least reading/studying something about coding.

This weekend, I picked up two more advanced Ruby books to read: Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and Eloquent Ruby.  I'm really excited to read more in-depth about OOD now that I've been programming for 6 months... I think I'm ready to dive in deeper and that I'm at a point were I will be able to process the information better than a few months ago.  I've already started reading it...

Never a moment wasted....Reading about OOD on the train.

In general, I keep myself pretty busy.  Outside of work, I'm working through the JavaScript courses on Treehouse.  I started with the absolutely most basic ones, so it's a bit of repetition of things such as loops, arrays, etc, but the way I see it, practice is practice and solidly understanding these fundamental concepts is not harmful.  I'm still studying Dutch.  I finished up my Dutch course, and I'm continuing to practice on my commute using the Duolingo app. 

I've been tackling larger tasks at work, building bigger features rather than small modifications on existing features.  I'm getting more comfortable and knowledgeable on some different gems that are used frequently like Interactors and Serializers.  It sometimes feels like I'm a weird mix of knowledge.  Some things that are new, I find easy to tackle and can handle without much guidance, I just kinda know what to do and how to write the tests as I go to guide my coding.  And other tasks, I don't really know where to begin without a good bit of coaching.  My brain feels a bit jumbled and unsorted with all the new information I'm trying to add to it in a fairly short amount of time.  I like the mix of things I get to build, and I like that I split my days between 2 different projects.

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.

Halfway through my jr dev internship.

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.

Week 5 of my internship: Update

Week 5 of my internship is done.  Working on Bitbucket on 2 different projects.  It's definitely a lot different to work on existing code and not writing a simple app from scratch like in the tutorials.  I have to spend time reading and figuring out what is going on in the code.  But I figure out things or I ask for help to figure them out.  One of the applications is in Dutch including the cucumber feature tests.   I think I'm doing ok with it.

This is pretty much sums up how I feel all the time and will for a long time:  "Programming is awesome if you like feeling dumb and then eventually feeling less dumb but then feeling dumb about something else pretty soon."  I hope I'm learning enough and learning it fast enough.

On Saturday morning, I worked through all of the second week's coursework of the online dutch MOOC course I'm taking through futurelearn and the university of groningen.   I didn't work on any code on Saturday.

On Sunday, I finished Chapter 5 of Hartl's Rails tutorial.  It's frustrating to only work on the tutorial during the weekend.  It's hard to pick it up after not touching it for a week and know where I was, where to go.  I need to try to maybe work a little during my train commute on it during the week.  I want to finish this book!  It was a goal of mine since I first started coding a couple months ago.

Here goes week 6....

Week 4 Internship update

For the past week or so, I've been working on various tasks with real project code!

Building a mailer, updating a rake task, adding columns to various models, updating controller methods, updating gemfiles, etc.  And writing features and spec tests in Rspec and Cucumber.  I spend a lot of time thinking and reading about new things I'm encountering in real project code.  I've learned about (and helped implement) an hstore column in a model and get that hash properly outputted in JSON.  I've learned about interactors to keep controllers clean and uncluttered with methods.  I've gotten several merge/pull-requests under my belt.

I'm more excited about coding the more I learn.  I'm still learning Dutch every week at class, plus during my ~3 hr commute everyday, I've been studying Dutch vocabulary using Memrise.  It's really helping to grow my word bank.  I've also started a MOOC free dutch course being offered by the University of Groningen.  I've been studying Hartl's Rails tutorial during the weekends too.  I still want to complete that book.  My goal is to complete it in the next month.  Then, I plan on going back to seriously study Javascript & jQuery.  I think that would be a good knowledge base for me to tackle next.

Needless to say, I'm busy all the time and I don't have much free time during the week for much else besides work, commute, dog walks, eat, sleep, repeat.  I am trying to make time for yoga a few times during the week.  I miss not running or going to the gym in the evenings, but, frankly, I'm just too tired.  I'm hoping with daylight savings time and longer days, I'll make time for evening runs at least once or twice during the week.

Week 3 of internship...

I'm in the third week of my apprenticeship.  I'm getting used to the commute every day back and forth to Amsterdam.  It's getting better... I'm coming home with more energy.  In the morning, people are so stressed out.  I try to stay out of others way, I don't care about pushing through everyone to get some specific seat on the train/etc.  I try to stay calm, not sweat stuff, and I usually study dutch on my phone using the Memrise app.  In the 3 weeks I've been commuting, I've learned ~375 dutch words using the app.  It's a great way to work on learning vocabulary every day with minimal effort.

Mondays are still the worst since I have the dutch course in the evening, but I'm managing.  I've even had energy the last 2 evenings to get back into doing yoga when I get home!  Very happy about that.  With the daylight increasing incremently everyday, I'm hopeful I can start going out for evening jogs a couple times during the week once it stays light enough for me to feel comfortable doing so.

I've pretty much finished up the bloccit app in the bloc foundations course.  I've started getting my feet wet with real project work with some (very) small testing tasks to work on.  I even did my first pull request for a real project today.

Tuesday Update

Started my internship on Monday!  I'm basically following the bloc.io program.  I started on the foundations unit of the bloc.io program and I'm going through each lesson and exercises.  I'm on exercise 18.  Right now going over Ruby concepts/OOP, then will move into Rails.  The lessons are going well since I've been studying these concepts on my own over the past couple months.  The commute to/from Amsterdam and Den Haag isn't the most fun, but I will manage.  We plan to move to A'dam this spring/summer, so I'm not too bothered about it right now, except that it is expensive!  Dogs are managing being alone all day for the past 2 days, so hopefully they will continue to do well with it.  Mondays are definitely going to be rough long days, since I have a Dutch course in the evening and I don't get home until after 10pm.

I've been working so hard lately on teaching myself to code and picking up a new language and frankly, it's the most exhausting period of my life right now.  I don't think I've studied as many hours as I do now even when I was in college or doing my Masters degree!  I'm focused and I'm willing to suffer through lack of sleep and such to get this new career and make our lives better for the both of us.  I'm so happy to have a husband who notices and appreciates.  He randomly sent me an awesome little pep talk today re: learning to program and learning Dutch:

I know you've done everything possible to get to where you are in Ruby and in Dutch in a really short timeframe.  And no matter what anyone else says, and no matter how anyone treats you, you can know that you are putting the effort in, and you've accomplished so much.  I'm more and more impressed every day.  Honestly, you've given me renewed drive to improve my development skills.

Now... time to study some Dutch, play with the dogs, and then SLEEP.

Wednesday.

I finished chapter 13 of the Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper. It covers Rails, Sinatra, & Ramaze.  Book is really showing it's age when the Rails version is 2.2.  :(  At least in the example Rails app, it gave me the opportunity to figure and update the old rails way to the terminology of Rails 4.2.  The intro to Sinatra was a nice bonus though.

I am thinking of moving onto Hartl's Rails Tutorial.  I want to move back into Rails learning and I want to be working with a more up-to-date book/tutorial.  I've gotten further than I thought I ever would in the Beginning Ruby book... 13 chapters, over 400 pages of Ruby code learning.  The following couple chapters of the book are on GUI-Based Desktop Application Development, Sockets, Daemons, etc.   I got the basics that I wanted to learn and I want to keep studying those basics in different ways and through building more and more applications and doing coding challenges like codewars.

Of course, I'm keeping up with doing some codewars.com challenges every day.  I am also doing at least 1 dutch lesson everyday.  I need to also learn 5-10 dutch irregular verbs and their past tenses every day too.

Monday + Tuesday

Working through Beginning Ruby by Peter Cooper, just finished chapter 12 (page 345) and built a small bot app.  I like this book better than Learn Ruby the Hard Way.  They cover many of the same topics.  I've also been trying to do a couple of the ruby fundamentals coding katas at codewars every day.

I had another dutch language class on Monday night.  I am trying to study a little Dutch every day.  I need to work on pronunciation.  It's hard for me.  And it kinda sucks being in an expat class.  The instructor will quickly switch to english for explanations and they other 2 students seem to like to use English instead of focusing on trying to speak in Dutch.  I try dutch first to try to explain things in class even if I butcher it (pretty sure that 100% of the time it's spoken terribly).

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.

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.