I hosted a RailsGirls meetup and give my first coding workshop!

So excited to write about this.  One year after building my first Rails app, I organized and presented my first coding workshop.  It's a pretty amazing thing to be able to do.

I have been kinda consumed lately with worrying and preparing for giving my first coding workshop.  I hosted ~18 coders at our local RailsGirls event for all day workshop.  I introduced the concepts of MVC and styling with CSS and the Bootstrap gem as we worked on adding functionality to a Tamagotchi - virtual pet app.  It was fun, but stressful for me.  And it was only stressful because I'm not used to being the center of attention or speaking for ~5 hours straight!

That's me! Presenting to ~18 bright (mainly women) coders.

Everyone was supportive of one another, and I really felt like we created a safe, friendly, open environment for learning about coding with Ruby on Rails.  I'm really proud of that.   I would love to do another workshop in a few months.  It's just kind of exhausting and intense to plan for 5 hours of coding content + activity.  I really had no idea how long my presentation would actually take or if folks would be bored out of their minds.

I was thinking it would be great to offer another, more low-key meetup option like a "Coffee & Code" type event where a small study group could get together for a couple hours and get help on working on their own projects or online tutorials/courses from a coach or 2.  It would take the pressure off of one person to present and host an all-day event.

Overall it was a great experience and empowering to be a room filled with bright women all interested and focused on coding!  I am, of course, thankful to work for a company that supports activities like this too!

Of course I have been neglecting blogging lately, but I have still been trying to learn new stuff- I've learned some more Angular & I've been playing around with Rails API with a Angular client-side app, but this experience really trumps anything else I've been doing otherwise!

My ~10 months of coding: an update.

Wow, I can't believe I haven't post for such a long time.  Sorry about that.  Even though I haven't been posting about my progress, I've still been busy coding, reading coding books, and even attended a small conference, and also took a few weeks off for a much needed vacation.

So, to recap, I've been learning to code for ~10 months and working professionally as a Ruby on Rails developer for ~5 months.  I feel I've learn a lot and progressed a great deal over the past months in my knowledge about Ruby and Rails.  I still get stuck on things, but not as often.  I can work through most things pretty independently.  Of course, I still like to talk through things with my colleagues because sometimes you find a better way to do things by just talking about it with another coder.  One thing I need to work on for the next few months is learning beyond Ruby by trying to do more JS and other languages.

I try to always be reading a coding book during my free and commuting time.  Most recently, I read Eloquent Ruby (a good review of basic Ruby concepts!).  I started reading Design Patterns in Ruby and, somehow, I'm not challenged with just reading one coding book :-P, so I am also concurrently re-reading Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby (POODR) on my commute.

My mornings.  7:30 am.  On the train and reading POODR.

I read POODR about 3 months ago for the first time.  I really liked it and learned some stuff, but to be honest a lot of the concepts were hard for me to get a good solid grasp of.  I have only re-read the first couple of the chapters, but I can already tell a difference on how well I am getting the concepts.  It feels really good to be more comfortable and have a better understand of object-oriented design concepts this time around.  It means I'm still learning and progressing.

I took a few weeks off at the end of August to go back to the US to go to Burning Man.  It was my second burn and was simple amazing.  I was worried it wouldn't be as moving as my first time, but luckily it was even more amazing.   I met a bunch of cool people, had meaningful conversations with strangers, wore my amazing fiber optic dress, danced all night, and generally just had a blast.  No phone, no internet, lots of dust.... ;) it was a great recharge for my spirit.  Just like my first time, it helped me refocus and re-evaluate where I am, who I am, and where I wanna go right now in my life.  It also reminds me of what/who I appreciate in my life and what is really important to me.

Riding around in the desert by the light of my dress.

A few weeks ago, Google had the first ever Polymer Summit in Amsterdam.  Polymer is a google framework for creating web components.  It's a bit out of my comfort zone since it is more front-end oriented than backend, but I spent the day learning how to use polymer and how get the most benefits out of it and the tools it provides.  I'm super excited to use it.  I've already started on a pet project to remake my personal site out of polymer.

This weekend there is another conference I will be attending - the Google DevFest in Amsterdam.  It's more oriented to mobile dev, but there is a workshop on Angular 2 that I'm really looking forward to attending.

I'm also helping out with the RailsGirls meetups.  I will be hosting the December meetup in Amsterdam.  I'm still working out ideas for it and planning for that.

And if all that doesn't keep me busy enough, I'm super close to my moving date and officially will be a resident of Amsterdam in a couple weeks!  So excited for that.  I'll trade a 1.5+ hr train commute every morning and evening for a 20 min bike ride.  

Finished POODR!

I finally finished Sandi Metz's Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby this morning!  w00t!  The second half of that book was pretty hard and above my head, but I powered through.

I felt it was a good experience for me to read POODR at my level (7 months of coding experience).  I got exposed to new concepts in basic OOD and just tried to let them 'wash over me' at this point even if I had poor grasp on what they really mean.  I'm not sure if it would have been productive to attempt this book earlier than I did.  I know I've gotten something out of it this first read, but can't wait for the next time I read it.  I'm going to go ahead and put on my calendar to re-read POODR again in 2-3 months.  It will be interesting to see how more I can understand or, at least, see what starts to sink in through re-reading it? :-)

I also listened to the second part of Sandi's interview on the CodeNewbies podcast.  The parts of her interview I really enjoyed was when she spoke of only comparing yourself to yourself (and no one else) when you are judging your progress and learning.   And that maybe we all should take a little breather from being so connected and online all the time...  I believe in that too.  It's one thing that I miss about living in the US and taking camping trips to very rural areas... where there is no way to access the internet because there's no service.  It forces you to take a brief sabbatical from not only the internet but also tv and media in general.  Frankly, I've been feeling a bit mentally overdrawn lately and can't wait to finally be on a vacation in a couple months.  Being completely cut off from the internet and media for a week is one of the main reasons that I'm really looking forward to my vacation.

I've also been tackling the RubyKoans tasks.  It's kinda addicting and most of the exercises can be completed pretty quickly.  There are 282 TDD oriented tasks to complete in the program.  In the past week, I've worked on/off during my commute and I've completed 216 out of the 282.  I think they are fun, but I also like testing, and I'm comfortable with it.

Since I've been doing the RubyKoans, I'm rocking a 24 day streak on GitHub!  I know that doesn't means anything to anyone else, but it means something to me.... I'm coding something I find meaningful, even if small, everyday.

Slowly getting through the Treehouse jQuery exercises.  I find it harder to get through the treehouse stuff since it is all video-based.  It's just not as convenient to do when I have time (that is mainly, on the train, during my commute), since I would have to remember to download the videos beforehand.  I just have to accept I will be going through their lessons at a slower rate.  I will keep working through the lessons when I have time.

Next up, I'm going to tackle learning SQL.  And for reading, I'm planning on starting Eloquent Ruby.  And hopefully finding some time on the weekends to collaborate on a Rails API / ReactJS app...

June 13: Dabbling in Elixir, more jQuery, more Ruby.

I didn't do much coding outside of work during the week.  Work has been fine, I feel like I'm progressing at a good rate, but outside of work, it was a rough week, so I couldn't put in much effort to coding during my free time.

But, I did spend late night friday/early saturday morning working through a Elixir tutorial that I had been wanting to tackle for a few weeks.  I successful went through it pretty quickly and got a fairly simple CRUD quotes app working perfectly locally.  However, I spent more time than that trying to get the deployment to Heroku (not in the tutorial) to work and failed.

To make sure it wasn't me or a dev environment issue (didn't figure it was, since it was running perfectly locally, but did it for a sanity check...), I cloned another sample elixir app and quickly set it up and deployed it easily, so I think based on the heroku error logs that there's some maybe dependencies issue going on.  It's kinda weird working with such a new framework like Phoenix, where it is so new that you git clone the framework directly onto your machine to use it.  For this specific tutorial, I was git checking out a specific branch with an older version of the framework to use... and maybe in deployment that's getting jacked.  I think maybe this is where my issue lies, but I'm not sure.  I gave up on trying to fix this project's deployment, I'd rather spend time learning something else or doing my own independent project to practice that waste more time on this one.  I'm glad there was this tutorial to do, but I wish it would have spent a lot less time on making the CSS snazzy and instead go through the deployment process.  I'd like some reassurance that this app was successfully deployed with its specific config settings even if it visually looks ugly! :-/

Today, I also finished up another segment in the Treehouse jQuery course.  I'm 1/2 through that course.  It's hard jumping back into studying something like jQuery with several days of break in between.  Takes a while to get my head back in it.

I'm still slowing reading POODR, probably 3/4 through it.  It's getting more difficult to keep up at the end.  But, I'm just trying not to get hung up on every little thing that's over my head and power through for now, since I plan to re-read it again in a few months.

I constantly feel like I need to keep pushing to learn and try out other languages like JS or elixir and not be solely vested in Ruby, since who knows if/when Ruby on Rails is going fade into the background.  But after experimenting with Elixir, it's clear that I really do love coding in Ruby.  It's just such a readable and pretty language, I'm not sure how you couldn't like it.  I'm really glad that I started out my coding adventure with Ruby and Rails.  And I'm happy it's what I work with, at least for now.

Progress Update: Learning jQuery, Studying OO Design...

I've been spending most of my commute time reading Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby.  I'm 2/3 of the way through it.  Some concepts are harder than others to understand, but I'm ok with that.  I'm sure I'll be re-reading this book again in 6 months.  I've been learning about agile dev, duck typing, inheritance, etc.  I really love how Sandi presents concepts.  I've also watched some of her podcast appearances (like on Talking Code) and her RailsConf 2015 talk ("Nothing is something") and can recommend them all.  She is inspiring to me...  She reminds me of my unofficial mentor at my last job/career... an incredibly intelligent female who I could only wish to be as smart as one day!

I'm slowly moving through the Treehouse JavaScript courses.  I finished up the JS fundamental courses and moved onto the jQuery course over the weekend.  I have been having a hard time finding the time to work on these courses during the work week.

6 months into programming.

I'm 6 months into the world of ruby and coding.  I'm still chugging along, trying to improve a little every single day.  I try to write some code everyday.  If I don't do that, I'm at least reading/studying something about coding.

This weekend, I picked up two more advanced Ruby books to read: Sandi Metz's Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby and Eloquent Ruby.  I'm really excited to read more in-depth about OOD now that I've been programming for 6 months... I think I'm ready to dive in deeper and that I'm at a point were I will be able to process the information better than a few months ago.  I've already started reading it...

Never a moment wasted....Reading about OOD on the train.

In general, I keep myself pretty busy.  Outside of work, I'm working through the JavaScript courses on Treehouse.  I started with the absolutely most basic ones, so it's a bit of repetition of things such as loops, arrays, etc, but the way I see it, practice is practice and solidly understanding these fundamental concepts is not harmful.  I'm still studying Dutch.  I finished up my Dutch course, and I'm continuing to practice on my commute using the Duolingo app. 

I've been tackling larger tasks at work, building bigger features rather than small modifications on existing features.  I'm getting more comfortable and knowledgeable on some different gems that are used frequently like Interactors and Serializers.  It sometimes feels like I'm a weird mix of knowledge.  Some things that are new, I find easy to tackle and can handle without much guidance, I just kinda know what to do and how to write the tests as I go to guide my coding.  And other tasks, I don't really know where to begin without a good bit of coaching.  My brain feels a bit jumbled and unsorted with all the new information I'm trying to add to it in a fairly short amount of time.  I like the mix of things I get to build, and I like that I split my days between 2 different projects.

Learning Javascript....

The social networking of coding community is an amazing part of being a software dev.  I have really enjoyed connecting with new folks through emails and twitter.  It's funny that I've also gotten in touch with 2 former colleagues that have or are in the process of making the transition from scientists to software devs!  It's been great to share tips about learning resources and experiences so far.

Since I've very interested in learning JavaScript, jQuery, Angular, etc right now, one of those colleagues who has learned JS himself suggested I check out Treehouse for their JS resources.  So I did.  I have a couple months to check it out for free, so I started today on their Javascript Basics course.  I got 1/2 through the coursework today.  It's extremely basic stuff right now... beginning syntax, using the JS console in the browser, variables, etc.  They have a lot of resources from JS to jQuery to NodeJS to AngularJS, so I'm excited to check it out and see how their material progesses.  One thing that really bugs me with a lot of the online resources is that the coding takes place in their own browser based workspace environment rather than locally.  I do not like that.  I guess it is a ok way to learn the basics, but it bugs me to not have a record of my work and progress locally or on github.

I haven't studied too much Ruby/Rails outside of work this week.  I'm pretty immersed in it during the day since it's my full-time job, so it's nice to break that up with learning JS outside of work.  I have had some moments lately where things that previously did not make a lot of sense getting clearer in my mind and I feel good about it... I can see that I'm making progress.