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.

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.