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.

Final pre-course work challenges finished! Foobar + temp conversion challenges.

As part of thefirehose project's pre-work course, there is a foobar challenge.  Although I know my solution needs refactoring, it's pretty cool to be able to get out a working solution for this in < 5 mins in Ruby.  I remember doing this challenge when I started coding two months ago and it took me hours and I had to *cheat* and look for hints online (I did it in jQuery instead of Ruby then).  Understanding the logic and for/while loops is so much better now!

The last challenge of the pre-course work was to make a temperature converter for C to F.  Easy.  Done in a couple minutes. The bonus 2nd part of this challenge was to allow user input (already did it for previous challenge) and make it convert both ways.  This was a little trickier because I needed to use regex to extract the integer and the unit for an input string like 32F or 101C.  But I did it.  Maybe not the prettiest solution, but it works!

So, I'm done with thefirehose project pre-course work now.  So I'm pretty much ready to go for either Tealeaf or thefirehose project bootcamps.

Friday's Progress

Finished CodeAcademy's Ruby Course!  Started up on Peter Cooper's Beginning Ruby book.  I am in Chapter 3, page 91.  I just finished a basic ruby program that inputs a txt file and does a bunch of analytics on it (counting characters, words, sentences, lines, etc).

Things are going well!  Pushing as hard as I can.  Github streak is starting up again :)