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Friday, December 12, 2014

How I learned Swift in about 3 weeks

I did not start my journey into Swift 3 weeks ago, but actually started back in June, the same month Swift was announced by Apple. I was very much focused on learning more Rails and had no real desire to learn it extensively, so I only dabbled in some reading. At that time I had already started learning Objective-C and messing around with iOS( which was just opening and closing Xcode). I started working through some of the Bloc iOS curriculum, but mainly read through curriculum and did not finish the alcohol calculator project.

Fast forward 2 months and I declared September as the month Swift for myself. I began reading the ever so dry Swift Language Guide and completed the Treehouse Swift course videos but wouldn't actually write Swift code for another month.

I have begun facilitating LearnWithMe sessions with CodeNewbies where the focus is choosing a subject in programming that you are interested in learning with others. I was approached, Swift came to mind right away, since it has been a milestone I continue to push down the list.

I started my first session with the CodeNewbies and ran through the Swift Tutorial: Quick Start, which I highly recommend due to it's great job in explanation of basic Swift programming and Xcode Playgrounds.  Just last week I started a tutorial I had on my list for months, which I highly recommend, Bloc's Swiftris tutorial. This tutorial was the perfect next step for myself to really understand how Swift works with the iOS framework. I also got actual hands on in Xcode and actually make an app work. I was blown away when I ran the build and heard the Tetris music running in the background, it was a great feeling.

Today was my 3rd Swift session and I ran through another basic tutorial called, Learn Swift. The nice part about this tutorial is the pre-packaged playgrounds you can download and play with.

What's Next?
My immediate goal is to start and complete another tutorial in iOS/Swift, I do not have plans of attempting non iOS tutorials at this point, since I already have a basic understanding of Swift; enough to at least debug errors. I have downloaded the FlappyBird Swift code which I will be reading through and plan on completing the Treehouse Swift Weather app.

If you are interest in joining me in learning Swift, keep an eye on the CodeNewbie forum for the next event.

My goal is to become proficient in mobile development and have the ability to transfer my web development ideas to the iOS platform. Thanks for joining on that journey.

Friday, December 5, 2014

Pairing in node with a Healthy Hacker

I had the opportunity yesterday afternoon to pair with Chris Hunt, host of the new podcast Healthy Hacker. After listening to the "Growing as a Programmer" he made an interesting announcement that I have not yet heard anyone else do at his caliber of programming. He was offering free time to pair with him in 30min increments. I signed up rathe quickly after noticing a number of open spots.

At the time of signing up you have to put in a subject to pair on for the session; With me being really ambitious I chose a subject I had zero experience in, node.js's socket_io plugin. I planned on messing around with it prior, in hopes to add live chat to my Ruby Newbies page, but it didn't happen. I got extremely side tracked with learning Ember and updating my Chuych app.

My overall impression of pairing with an absolute stranger on a subject I had no knowledge on, was great. Not only did we finish the socket_io tutorial, we also got it pushed to heroku and tested it out live. I did the driving in the pairing, while Chris navigated through the documentation, which was extremely valuable in me learning. We did get hung up on pushing a node/express.js project to heroku, since both our experience were in Rails, but he was able to pin point in the docs how to update the server to the heroku environment variable.

I am actually pretty stoked to continue to work on this project on my own and implement it with the RubyNewbies things. Node is a new frontier for me and I hope to continue exploring the various plugins and frameworks associated with it. To view our code check it out here.

If you are interested in pairing with Chris, checkout his calendar and sign up soon, but there seem to be very limited spots available.



Thursday, December 4, 2014

My VIM config

This is a copy of my current .vimrc. Do you have any suggestions?

2 weeks and nothing but VIM

I decided that the 2 days prior to my Thanksgiving holiday would be a great time to switch to VIM at work and I admit it was stuff not to pull up Sublime text for specific things. One of the most common reasons I have heard for not learning VIM is the need to not loose time for switching workflows; This concern is understandable, but the only way to learn is by doing.

The past two weeks have been packed with learning how to update my .vimrc and making sure I have the most common plugins installed.

Right away I missed some of the most common shortcuts in sublime text, like quick indenting and commenting. Thanks to the Nerdtree and my custom key mappings I can still use them. I also finally figured out what a <leader> which has greatly assisted in mapping special commands to.  

Some of things I look forward to learning is finally figuring out how to do project wide search properly, at moment the rails-vim commands and accessing the buffer tree have been great additions to my workflow. In addition to all that I hope to learn how to run test directly from vim with a mapped key command, but like all things, I have to pace myself in learning; I am desperately trying not to spend my entire day learning cool tricks - I still work to do.

*update - thanks to @tracehelms I was able to solve my project searching issue.


Tuesday, December 2, 2014

Copy current file path in VIM

I found a vim shortcut to grab the file current path and copy it to the system clipboard.  I wrote a blog post in the past about key bindings in sublime, and my favorite key binding which has the same path grabbing functionality.

The .vimrc can the host the same type snippets that sublime, but obviously in a different syntax. I am pretty excited to add this to vim with it being one of the two thing I miss from sublime. The last thing I miss is not really a missing functionality but just my lack of knowledge and that is project wide searching, but I believe with a little practice I can figure it out.

If you have any pointers in working with let me know.

Monday, December 1, 2014

Learning Swift with Me

Tonight I had the opportunity to learn Swift with other new developers and I am impressed amount of knowledge I took while slowly going through a tutorial with others. This has definitely been one of the learning experiences.

Swift is a new territory for me, something that is new for me. I like that is also newer for everyone else. For example, one of my goals for 2015 is to actually build an app (not a tutorial) in Swift before March. I am hoping that the app I finally build is my chuych app.

The tutorial we completed was A Quick Start Guide to Swift and I highly recommend for anyone looking to expand their knowledge into Swift. My next tutorial will I am aiming to complete is Bloc's Swiftris.

If you are interested in learning how to write a Tetris Game in Swift and want to learn with me, keep an eye on the Code Newbie discourse page.