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's progress

Continuing to toil away this week.   Lots of frustration and thoughts of "will i ever be successful at this???", but I continue to power on.

1. Finished up Jumpstart Lab's Blogger tutorial on Tuesday
2. I worked through Envy Lab's Rails for Zombies on Wednesday and Thursday
3. I did the Railsbridge's Suggestotron tutorial WITHOUT the use of scaffolding.  In this tutorial, I build an app that you can add topics and then, upvote vote them and it displays the number of total votes.  I tried to hand write as much code as possible to help me work and get better with my stupid little errors I make in my ruby code.  I was pretty proud that I decided to do the tutorial with as little references to the tutorial as possible and I didn't use the automagical scaffolding generation.
4. I even figured out some of the 'extra credit' topics, including adding downvoting ability to the app to go along with the upvoting.  And I sorted the topics descending by the # of votes for each topic.

Don't know what I will work on tomorrow.  Start Hartl's Rails tutorial??  I was thinking of doing the Rubyslist app again, but try to figure it out a lot on my own.  So many resources to choose from!  I've been thinking about app ideas too for the future. 

Weekend Progress.

Finished up lessons on looping w/ forEach and for loops.  Got a little stuck on one of the looping exercises:

• Go back to your page where it would pop up an alert every time you clicked an element and say what kind of tag it was. Refactor your JavaScript for this page to use a loop.

But I slept on it last night and figured out the solution in only a couple minutes this morning!  Whee!  Then finished up the section on debugging, luckily already practicing some of these techniques in my practice exercises.

Tomorrow I will do the next exercise, the Ping-Pong challenge, and then dive into behavior driven development (BDD)!  Yay!

Day 3 Progress Update

I continued some exercises on the UWaterloo Computer Science Circles Python Tutorial, but then their website was unresponsive, so I am switching gears and started some video lessons on Epicodus.  I'm excited to learn HTML/CSS and hopefully can update my blog to reflect what I learn.  I'm not keen on the stock formats!

I installed the recommended text editor Atom instead of Sublime Text, since it is free and recommended by Epicodus.

I went through 5 or so lessons of Epicodus today.  I then switched gears and looked at setting up my dev enviro for Ruby on Rails.  I looked at the Ruby4kids site, then tried the tryruby short interactive tutorial.  I then got frustrated figuring out how to get darn Ruby on my Mac w/OSX Yosemite 10.10.  I guess I'm dumb and thought the install would be straight-forward.  I finally googled and found some step by step instructions and will hopefully get that set up tomorrow!

Day 2 of a New [Scary?] Journey.

Am I really doing this?  This wouldn't be the first time I've attempted a career change...  and it would certainly be less expensive (no expensive masters program this time) if I focus on self-study and do affordable online courses to supplement my free training resources.

It's scarier this time around.  I'm older (early 30s) and leaving my established career field.  My background is chemistry.  I've worked for 7 years as an analytical chemist in pharmaceuticals....(this includes a year gap where I went back to college to get a Masters in Teaching, but could not find a job as a middle school science teacher afterwards, so I went back into the lab.)

This year, I moved with my partner to the Netherlands from the US.  This was a dream fulfilled for us and one we made happen by taking a huge chance: selling everything, quitting jobs, and moving to Germany to find work.  Luckily he successfully found a great job in the Netherlands.

I'd like to think I'm a bright, inquisitive, tenacious problem-solving chemist... which hopefully my scientific mindset will transfer over and be beneficial in learning to code.

Here's the things I think I have going in my favor to be successful:

• My partner is a senior level C#/.NET developer who knows front-/backend and middleware.  He will be my mentor.  Even though he is not familiar with RoR, he knows a lot of other languages, knows how to set up a dev enviro, etc, so he is a resource.  He is going to learn RoR along with me so he can help and we can collaborated on projects when I get to that level.
• I can devote a full-time job's level of time commitment to learning.  I am not employed.
• I have a background in not only science, but QC.  That means I'm used to things having to be done exactly a certain way so that they are credible and analyses go as planned with intended results.  I'm used to attention to detail to a ridiculous degree.  I am also flexible and adept to troubleshooting and working through problems.
• There are a ton of online resources for training.
• There is a RailsGirls meetup group in nearby Utrecht, NL.   There is a frontend meetup group in Amsterdam, NL.  Both of these cities aren't too far by train.  The meetings are in English too.

I am starting this blog on the advice in the posts of Josh Kemp who was able to go from beginner to a full-time, employed RoR developer in ~9 months.  I am mainly blogging to hold myself accountable, rather than for self-promotion at this point.

My goal (7 months?) is to become proficient enough I can find an paid internship or junior level position.  I want to learn RoR and HTML/CSS.

Here's my gameplan for the rest of November...

1. Finish the Computer Sciences Circles intro to programming/Python course.  I started this course a day ago, when I was looking into the 1-yr BS degree in CS from OSU and they recommended trying it out.  I want to finish since I've started.  I'm on exercise 7C currently.
2. Set up my development environment for RoR with the help of my mentor.
3. Read Zed Shaw’s "Learn the Command Line the Hard Way"
4. Pick one of these courses and start it:
1. The Odin Project
2. One Month Rails
3. Epicodus free online course

Back to studying....