Learning to Ruby

I've had a pretty busy two weeks. Last week was Atlanta Big Data week, and event that was put on by Emcien. On Tuesday, I went to an event called How to Become a Developer, which featured a panel of developers who talked about how they got started. There was a lot of good information from the panel. It was a little annoying that so much of the Q & A time was taken up by people who just wanted to prove what they knew, but overall, it was a great experience.

The next event that I went to for Atlanta Big Data Week, was the two-day Hackathon that they held at hypepotamus. This was a really great learning experience for me, because I ended up being the team lead, which was odd because I have only been programming for a little over 1/4 of a year now. I was in way over my head on the project, but we had fun working on it, I met a lot of cool people, and was exposed to lots of new stuff. I'm going to stay in touch with those guys.

Hacklanta 2014

As a result of the How to Become a Developer event, Al Snow and Gerry Pass put together a meet-up called Career Planning for Ruby Newbies, where we got a lot of good information about learning Ruby on Rails and landing our first job. Afterwards, we all went to the monthly Atlanta Ruby Users Group meet-up, where John Saddington had a talk about blogging/social media, and how it can affect your career as a programmer and entrepreneur. Ruby on Rails rockstar, Obie Fernandez was also there and let us look at some of his code that involved using a gem called Wisper to do some publishing [it think?]. To be perfectly honest with you, though, I didn't really understand what his code did, but It was cool looking at it and just seeing how much it looks like mine. I was a good day all around.

Now, the plan is to get all of my ducks in a row: I will be blogging a lot more and getting my programming and development skills where they need to be. I'm going to re-do the Michael Hartl tutorial and instead of doing the application again, I'm going to turn the project that I've already done into something more personal. There is also a free 6-week web development boot camp that starts next week. I plan to meet up every Monday with some of the new people that I've met through this learning process to work through it. 

Another thing that I'm doing to work on my programming is Project Euler. I've completed the first two problems and I plan to do the next pretty soon. Over the past few weeks I've gotten lots of good information on programming and web development. If you're trying to learn, the meet-ups are a strong step in the right direction.

Code for America

The next event that I'll be attending is the National Day of Civil Hacking . I'm really looking forward to this. Probably the only short coming of the hackathon that I went to last weekend, for me, was that I was the best developer in my group. I hope to learn from some real coders at this one...but I sure I'll meet more awesome people as well.

So I Took a Week Off...

...and studied Python. lol!

Studying Ruby was starting to wear me down a little bit, so I took the week off and did the Python track on Code Academy. Python and Ruby are pretty similar; I'm not sure which on I like the most, now. What I do know, is that I need to start focusing on studying Ruby on Rails. I watched a video on teaching yourself to code, and apparently, Rails is where it is currently located. So I'm going to go back working on that this week.

I'm starting by going back and doing the lynda.com tutorial on Rails and to  try to get it installed on my computer, again. After that I'm going to do this tutorial that everyone is always talking about. After I finish those two things, I'm think that the next step is  the team treehouse tutorials; they have a 14-day free trial, and by the time I finish all of that, I will have a pretty good handle on Rails, or at least, what I need to do to get a good handle on Rails. [...provided that I can get it working on my computer]

Another thing that I'm considering,  is going to the Iron Yard  code school. I met one of the founders a month or so ago at the iOS meet-up, and then I went to a presentation that he gave on building apps, last Monday at hypepotamus. I really want to go, but it's pretty expensive.

While I'm working on my Rails game, I'm going to make time to continue studying Ruby and Python. I put my books down this week while I was studying Python, but that was mostly because I'm reading a section of the pickaxe book that they recommend that you skip, if you're a beginner, but...

...not in my house. 

Skipping through books just doesn't really sit well with me: I've been re-reading the same section, so I understand what's going on. Studying Python has help me understand Ruby better, though. By thinking about the differences between the two, I get a better handle on both of them.

I think that I'm going to start reading my Python book, now, as well. I like Python, and I'm going to keep studying the language, but I'm going to have to wait until I'm comfortable with Rails before I start picking up Django, so Python is going to be mostly a hobby for me for a little while. Also, they just released a new version on Python, this week, so there's that.

I'm starting to understand what's going on a lot better and I'm really looking forward to building things. So hopefully I'll be able to demonstrate something soon.

In other news, I stopped going on facebook and restarted my Rosetta Stone Hindi and Spanish this week. I'm getting pretty good a my foreign languages. It's also a lot more fun when it's a retreat from studying my programming. I'm doing the voice part, now, too...because pronunciation is key in Hindi and I got caught out there saying an embarrassing thing on accident one time.

WHY IS INSTALLING THE MySQL GEM SO HARD??? [the Struggle is Real]

LOL...seriously, though. I don't think people really use Ruby on Rails and everyone is lying to me. I have been trying to get it to work all day. I actually got it to work once...and then it stopped working, again. I'm hoping that there is someone at hypepotamus that can help me with it tomorrow.

In the mean time, I've started reading another book and went back to learning python, too. It was driving me crazy not working with python for some reason, so I re-started the Code Academy lessons. I got a new book from my cousin, it's called 7 Languages in 7 Weeks; it's pretty good. I did the first day yesterday and I'm about half way through day 2, now. I think the jumping around between books and working on python, as well, will be good for me. I'm getting really antsy with ruby and I feel like I have a pretty good grasp on how it works. From here on out, it's probably going to be more about learning about the methods and applying what I know.

The Coding Complete book is starting to frustrate me a little bit, to be honest. It's talking about some things that I don't really understand. A lot of it is over my head, so I'm taking it in pieces. The pickaxe book is good because it keeps me learning ruby and I need it to do the assignments in the 7 Languages in 7 weeks book: the first language is ruby. My cousin also sent me Programming in Python 3: A Complete Introduction to the Python Language, but I think that I'm going to hold off on starting that one, at least until I finish the Code Academy exercises.

I guess what I'm really struggling with most right now is understanding how everything fits together. I'm not completely lost, though. I know HTML, and I've worked with JavaScript and JQuery, but I don't really understand how Rails fits in. I understand a little bit, but it's fuzzy for me. The thing is, that no matter how frustrated or stumped I get, I realize that as long as keep working on it, it gets better.

@hypepotamus

I haven't been making any entries for the past few days, mostly because of extracurricular activities. I'm at hypepotamus, now, working on stuff. It's been a good day. The weather here is nice, too.

The meet up that I went to on Thursday was more of a social...son, I was a little disappoint. Not really, it wasn't the one where they help people set up Rails, but I'm glad that I went. I learned a lot of stuff, one of them being that I'm further ahead than I thought I was. I also got a lot of really good advice on my learning process.

protip: if someone lives in Alpharetta, Marietta, Lawrenceville, or any other area that is outside of the 285 perimeter, they DO NOT live in Atlanta, and you should tell them to stop telling people that. 

The meet up on Sunday, that I wanted to go to, was actually not in Atlanta, which bothers me a little but :). Too many people from the outskirts of Atlanta like to tell people that they live in Atlanta and that the areas around where they live are called "Atlanta." As a result, they set up meet ups called "Atlanta Ruby Users Group" that aren't actually in Atlanta [okay, maybe that one was in Atlanta, but just barely]. So yeah...I missed that particular meet up.

I have been working on my coding, though. I've finished the code academy stuff and started reading the the pickaxe book. I think this one is better...it could be because I've know more now and therefore I understand the topics, but I doubt it. I don't regret reading The Book of Ruby, first, though. Before I started reading this I was planning on re-reading TBoR, reading this one is a better idea. I also found a list of books to read, so I won't be starving for reading material any time soon.

The good news is that the more time that I spend learning, the more I understand and am comfortable with. That isn't anything groundbreaking or anything, but sometimes when you get bogged down into learning something new and challenging, you forget that eventually it's going to click and it's going to be awesome.