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.

Wednesday's Progress

• Finished Tealeaf Prework Course!  Found the Ruby book and exercises useful.
• Jumped back into Beginning Ruby book. Finished Chapter 8, Chapter 9 and started Chapter 10 (page 253).

Tuesday's update

Since last post, I wanted to build a Reddit style site.  I wanted to do it with minimal tutorial step-by-step guidance and no scaffolding magic.

I found a good resource here.  Not a bunch of code copying, I completed the bones of it and what I really found useful is the user story prompts.  I need to do that when I do my own project, keeps me from panicking :).  I even included additional changes to displaying the up/down votes and used bootstrap styling...  It includes pagination, bootstrap-sass gem, upvoting and downvoting using boolean (true/false logic) in which user has only 1 vote on a topic and can change between up/downvotes, authentication via Devise....

RedditClone Screenshot

I've been thinking a lot what my path I will continue on is going to be.  There's supposed to be a dev bootcamp in Amsterdam in March or April (maybe?).  I have no idea about the costs or if I will be invited as a participant.  That's at least 2-3 months away though.  There's a Railsgirl beginner workshop coming up at the beginning of February, I'd like to go to it, but I'm afraid I've advanced past its topics since I'm already set up a dev environment and building little beginner apps and deploying to Heroku and posting on github.

I've been thinking about signing up for an online bootcamp and I'm leaning towards Tealeaf Academy.  I've seen some blog posts online and also on reddit on folks who have succeeded with Tealeaf and gotten jobs afterwards.  The price is one of the lowest I've seen ($2500 total) and you pay in 3 different segments.  Estimated completion time for the program is 4 months.  Working on it full-time, I'd hope I could complete it in less though.  I'm definitely committed.  I've currently got a 29 day streak going on Github.  I'm working hard and struggling through some topics.

I think I'm going to look into the prep work for Tealeaf and work through it.  I think it's mostly a review, so I think I could go through it pretty quickly, then I can make a decision on the program.