This is the week I will apply myself to Ruby

I have wrapped an awesome weekend of meeting influential Rails developers and Rubyists. I still blown away all the great connections I made this week and highly encouraged any one looking to break into the community to attend a conference is available.

On top of meeting new people I met a few companies who are looking to grow their team. I plan to submit some applications this week and look forward to hearing responses back. I have 6 months of experience today in Rails. I am still not as confident in some of the advance things but hope to continue working on that.

I have also begun working on the business side of Chuych and looking forward to opening it up to real people for use. I am also a little nervous but have kept the app dead simple to use. I get more of the design done on the main page and index page, but have not touched the church show page. I plan to spend a couples tonight on it to complete it.

One of the people I met this week was Katrina Owen and I saw this video on Afshin's G+. I highly recommend everyone to watch it you are looking to get a job in Ruby but do not have  a CS degree or feel inadequate.

Refactoring Rails

I am very pleased with my experience with the Refactoring Rails workshop with @kytrinx. I started overwhelmed and unable to refactor the provided code within 20mins.  I was however able to follow along and understand the solution.

I also got some exposure to Sinatra and Minitest which I had no problem understanding. It seems as minitest are the VIM to Ruby test. Most people I talked to to said they use Rspec, but I guess its still good to learn how to read.


The test look no different from ruby classes and methods and simple to read. I might look into doing some more exercises with them down the road. I also need to sign up for exercism.io

2 days and no Ruby

For the first time in months, I have not commit a session to git or typed a line of code. The past 2 days I have been focused on getting school work done and traveling to St. Augustine for the Ancient Ruby Conference. I am super stoked today and attending a Refactoring Rails course today, presented by Katrina Owen (exercism.io). Today I will be spending 7+ hours working on specifically Ruby.

Ancient Ruby officially starts tomorrow an I hope network with individuals in the community. Despite me missing 2 days of coding time, I am sure to get 30+ hours of valuable learning. 

Stay tuned for notes an tweets.

Still Focused on Ruby. Passively taking offers for jobs

I am off to a great start to my learning this week. I have struggled in the past 2 weeks with getting more than 14 hours of learning per week. Previously I was waking up at 4am every morning and working 3 hours. That unfortunately has not been as easy and I am now just sleeping through my alarms, I was also going to sleep at 9pm every night. I am now just focusing on staying up at night and working 9-12pm which has been more successful. I also get 3 uninterrupted hours focused on learning.

This week I have multiple things I am focusing on:

Hartl Chapter 3 & 4
Test First Ruby
Chris Pine Chapter 9 & 10
Also anything that can help me with the design for Chuych.

I working different tracks of the Odin project simultaneously and looking forward to Ancient Ruby the next week. I attending one day in advance for the Refactoring Ruby workshop. I am nervous and excited for it and hoping to walk away with a better understanding of lang. I am also going network my way into as many Rubyist's mindshares.

On the job front:

I am doing very well in my day, so much that I am able to afford things like Bloc and Ancient Ruby. I am now passively looking for Junior Dev/Apprenticeship opportunities. My dilemma is I now make around 15k less than a Junior dev in NY of SF, so I really need to transition into a role that is comparable in salary or take an apprenticeship where I can make that within 3 months.

I am also considering doing sales within a startup in hopes to easily transition into the industry.

My thoughts have changed no that I am on the other side of Bloc, but I am the main breadwinner in my family and have to make sure my next move makes sense.

If you are looking to build a ruby gem. @brandonhilkert just released his book this morning. Pick it up to help him out.