Sunday's Progress

We went to my first RailsGirls meetup in a nearby town.  It was a presentation over MVC and HTML/CSS.  I'm slowing wrapping my brain around the idea of MVC.  I'm glad Josh could go with me.  Glad coding processes/design overlap so that he can explain things to me even though RoR is foreign to him as a C#/.NET programmer.

Looked at Learn to Program a little when I got home.  I got through another exercise in the book.  Tired.

I just found out that there is a group planning a Dev Bootcamp in Amsterdam.  Very excited and interested in this!  I hope it is (a) coming up soon and (b) that the tuition will be affordable.  It would be an amazing opportunity.

Looking forward to starting fresh this week.

Last couple days progress!

Still working through Chris Pine's Learn to Program...

I got through chapters 7-9, even going back to re-do and practice exercises over again.  I want to make sure everything is sinking in into my head well.

I got RailsGirls app setup on my system and ready for the meetup tomorrow.

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.

Tuesday 11/25...

Went through a couple more Epicodus exercises, but got stuck on some of the exercises.  I got through the leap year exercise, learning how to use chai.js and mocha.js for writing and testing specs and then refractoring my code.

Learning to use Chai.JS and Mocha.JS for spec testing in BDD.

But on the following independent exercises, I felt too challenged without any support - I know the online course is drawn from the in-class materials and I felt without the in-class support, the independent assignments were a good bit above the examples that were illustrated.

So...I'm really proud of my progress in HTML, CSS, and JS over the last 2 weeks, but.... instead of spending a lot of time to figure out javascript challenge exercises on my own, I'm going to go ahead and switch gears to Ruby.  Getting into Ruby and Ruby on Rails is my real goal, so I'm going for it.  The basis of knowledge I learned in these other languages will be useful and help me move quickly into learning the new.

I started reading Chris Pine's Learn to Program book.  I read the first 4 or so chapters tonight.  Reads well and easy to understand.  I'm hoping to get through most of the book this week.

Ping Pong Test (aka FizzBuzz Test)

I figured out the ping pong test!  Feeling good with my progress.  Oddly, I got the loops and if/else if statements figured out pretty quick, but what tripped me up the most was figuring out how to get my integers listed properly into my bulleted list.  The solution was so easy once I got that bit finally fixed in my head!

My final solution. 

Here's more info on the Ping Pong test (aka Fizz Buzz), apparently it's a popular interview question:  Why Can't Programmers.. Program?  Really...199 out of 200 programmers can't figure it out?  Maybe my odds are better than I thought then? :-)

I also did a couple lessons on BDD/TDD process.  Happy with today's progress.

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!

Friday 11/21

Not too much progress today.  Just very fatigued and brain fog, that made it hard to follow/think through new concepts.  I had to keep watching and watching clips again for anything to sink in.  Oh well, everyone has their off days.

I did get through the introduction of arrays and looping in javascript.  Getting closer to closer to the section on Ruby.

I'm feeling reasonable about the progress I've made this week.