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.

Wednesday's progress.

• Did 16 lessons of Git Immersion today.  Getting my feet wet with Git!
• Finished Chapter 6 of Chris Pine's Learn to Program tonight.  I am doing all the exercises as I go along.