I like giving perspectives on how I am doing once I reach certain milestones. I originally planned on recording a video and completing an AMA on reddit, but did not get a large response. I am not sure if its because I kind of removed from the Aspiring Developer scene and no w moving into the obscurity of devs who made the jump in a job.
My hope is to continue to help others and answer questions for anyone looking for one. When I started this in Oct of 2013, I had no idea where to go or what to start learning. I would of loved someone to take the time and answer my questions or give me advice on what to learn.
I am serious when I say, email me or DM me for anything. I can't do pair programming at the moment, but I can jump a quick chat also, just ask.
How Do I feel?
Now that I am on month into the new job, I am very happy with what I have learned. My personal study at home has decreased quite a bit since I am now focusing on my family on the weekends, but I getting tons of time to research the new concepts I am faced with at work.
I spent quite some time working with the Twitter API and learning the in's and out's. I had the challenge of implementing the ability. this past Friday my company held a Hack Day where all engineers are aloud to work on any work related passion project of their choice. I was short on ideas and confidence to complete a task in one day. I originally sought on refactoring something after all the reading I have been doing on it from Katrina Owen, but found that to be a path towards a never ending rabbit hole.
I ended choosing to take on the task of updating the our to use the most update Twitter Gem and functionality. I ended up not completing this task within one working day due to too many interlocking dependencies to old functionality. I did however learn a lot about the gem and another called state_machine. My skill on researching documentation has definitely increased and making it easier to learn (checkout this article for more info on learning through docs).
In reality I am doing great and keeping up with pace of where I need to be. I however, would like to speed up my learning, which I plan to do in the next few months.
What am I learning working on?
I mentioned my learning is decreasing at home, which is true, but I am definitely more focused and spending less time goofing around (Twitter/Netflix) while studying. I have taken on the task to learn Objective-C/Swift, Javascript, and on continue learning Intermediate Ruby.
My plan has been to complete Objective-C and Swift on the weekends, since it requires the most concentration. I did a bit of learning the basics of C and loving to point out the different parts similar to Ruby. It is definitely easier have a basic understanding of Ruby and programming. I would of definitely been lost trying to learn Objective-C first, with all its boiler plate code. My goal is not to become a professional in iOS but to hope to gain a new ability in creating fun apps to share with friends on my phone. That goal will hopefully be realized before the end of the year.
Javascript has been another language where I appreciate knowing Ruby first. Understanding what variables and functions are generally has helped me progressed through the basics easily. I have learned JS in the past but never followed through any tutorials or books due to my focus on Ruby. I have been going through treehouse videos to understanding more of the basics and eyeing a few books to expand my know.
My work does use CoffeeScript and I plan on reading through this free book this weekend. I also have a talk I am preparing on Ember for FrontEndOrlando.
My goal is to be able to write production level JS/CoffeScript by the end of September.
Ruby is always going to carry a special place in my learning, as it will be my main lang for awhile. I was burnt out on spinning my circles with learning programming due to the learning the basics of Ruby (class, method, variables definitions) over and over. I am excited to finally get into some intermediate to Advance books. I have completed POODR but have plans to go through that again.
I am currently working through Confident Ruby for a work book club as well as WGR. I am disappointed in myself for not going through WGR until now, since there are so many explanations that would have help me along the way. I really enjoy layout and looking forward to becoming Well Grounded while hosting the upcoming RubyNewbie book club. My goal for Ruby is to write expert level code before the end of the year.
I have discovered a great pace while reading both of these books. I reading through each section 2-3 times, in order to pick up the concepts I missed on the first pass.
---
I definitely have a lot on my plate but looking forward to continuing my learning and getting back into some personal projects as well. As always thanks for reading.
No comments:
Post a Comment