Ruby Newbie Iniation

Today was a bit of an anomaly where I spent 5 hours working with web dev stuff on a Monday. Not too much code but  lot of studying and reviewing concepts.

To start I had the first Ruby Newbie study group meeting. I am super stoke that we got 16 RSVP's and looking forward to continue the Early Birds on a weekly basis. I had the technically difficulty where once I pressed the start hangout, IT CRASHED!!! I could not assist anyone in getting back on, but later figured out a work around thanks to Afshin, I highly recommend following him. The man is a genius! His solution is below

"I always get errors trying to join these things... my solution:  copy the url, logout, paste the url and go there at which point you'll be prompted to log in again, after that it should work."

I also had a quick interview with company #4, which we both decided I was not a good fit (my first denial). I really having the conversation and the recruiter recommend I follow them and let her know in a few months, after I got a little more experience. I personally do not my self ever working for the company, since they a small startup and not a devshop looking for nimble software engineers to work with everything from QA to managing hadoop. Since I am not planning on working or pursuing I highly recommend you guys check them out, they Quanttus and they hiring like crazy. So if you are in the Boston or looking to move there, reach out to emily.

I finally ended my day with a quick SCRUM with the Odin group, where I plan to start doing some more contributing. It a great way to beef up the resume, and also a way to give back to an awesome project.

The final night edition of the Ruby Newbie study group went off well, with no issues. We had a full hangout with a rotating cast of characters as well as a strong number of viewers. A good amount of Novices and Beginners, which is pretty sweet.

This week I need to push at finishing chapter 9 and 10 in LTP as well as reading chapter 2 and 3 in Beginning Ruby. There is definitely so much I do not in know Ruby and I looking forward to having a strong group of people to help.

I then finished the day with 4 hours of test. I applied to company #5 at a whim after reaching to a company on twitter. I quickly responded to by the CTO and given some tests to work, needless to say I pretty excited to go through them, and found I had a strong understanding of Rails and Agile development. I was definitely weaker with all the JS and HTML questions, but I am looking forward to chatting with them since this would be great opportunity to work from home and have no need to move. I will keep up to date my efforts, I am looking forward my second interview for Company #1 today.

Roundup:

For those keeping score.

Company #1: 2nd interview today
Company #2: No response after 1st interview, I will reach out next week (sort of busy interviewing)
Company #3: 2nd interview is next TUES, in person!
Company #4: DENIED, it was a great talk, but I was not a great fit.
Company #5: No interview yet, but I have engaged the CTO via Twitter.

Encouragement to complete my personal projects

I stumbled upon Nathan Barry months ago but not really sure how, most like someone retweeting something of his that was interesting. I have signed up to his newsletters which has been great, but the latest blogpost is exceptional. Not only does it describe the very position I am in with Chuych, it has encouragement enormously.

It's confirmation of my belief not to live on "What if's" but "Oh well's."

Please read his post and let me know if you got anything out of it.

Nathan Barry - This Moment

Setting up Postgres and Homebrew

I spent too much time trying to figure out how to get my Postgres database while trying to submit my first pull request to the Odin Project. I have outline some tools to help anyone looking to move on from SQLite3.

This railscast basically explains it all.

What I missed:

I installed Postgres to my mac but not via the command line. I had to first install Homebrew. Home

*I also never ran [rake:db:create]

Installed exercism.io

I tried installing execism.io a number of times but could not figure out what I was doing wrong, well until last weekend. So here my steps.

1. Signup for execism.io
2. Download the client
3. Make sure you have Hombrew installed *I missed this step.
4. Now follow these instructions
5. Once installed use this guide to get started

*If you have issues let me know and I or a member of the exercism team can assist. Katrina Owen is very responsive.

It took me a while to get up and running but I am looking forward to getting going on this. not only is there mini:test and Ruby code to solve, there also code available in a number of different languages. I might try out the Python or Go code eventually but at the moment the only extra work I do is Ruby.

My updated resume

Well I got an interview request in my email from company #4. I will write my experience with this interview on Monday but for now I would like to share what I did to get this interview unannounced.

About 1 month into Bloc I felt I needed to start looking outwards at different jobs in Ruby development to have a better idea on what sort of questions and material I should cover with my mentor. I decided to get job alerts sent to my phone from twitter as well as signed up for glassdoor alerts. I eventually stumbled upon Angel.co which is a job site specifically for startups to raise funding and hire employees. I signed up for that site and did nothing with it. I then found another site similar call whitetruffle, where you post your resume and companies find you. Thinking this was a great idea I posted as much info as possible about myself and shared links to my work at the time, but got no response.

Fast forward to 3 months later and post Bloc.io and Ancient City Ruby; I realized I never completed a resume that included all my efforts. I had previously been sharing my current sales resume with some mention of I am actually looking to be a developer. Now that I look back at this I realize how stupid I was to send a resume with a sales focused resume to a company looking for a software developer, regardless I updated the resume by taking out all the stuff prior to my current position and even cut that in half. I then replaced that info with my experience at Bloc and a special section called "Personal Ruby Development" where I outlined the courses, books,tutorials I used. I also added a Github repo section so they could easily find my work.

My resume is nothing special, just a word document with a limited amount info. Just enough info to get an idea of what I have done. When I applied to job #1 I barely wrote to 3 sentences about who I was and why I wanted the job. I just shared links to my blog, it was lot easier than applying for a sales job.

I have applied to a lot of jobs outside of the developer world and I have never received as much response from any resume before as I did this one, ever. Most people in my current industry get jobs because of who they know or their extensive experience in sales. The fact that I received 4 responses with less than 7 months of personal experience and not professional experience gives prove that there is some truth in my tweet. My goal was just to get an idea of what an actual dev interview is like and the experience has been overwhelming positive, so much that I might actually have a job in had at the end of this. Even if nothing works out I have gained more experience by trying, than by wondering "What if?"

I am pretty fired up and excited to see what happens this coming week; I have a first interview on Monday with #4 and a second interview with #1 on Tuesday. I also have a second interview with #3 the following week.

If you are also looking for some encouragement on getting an interview. Check out the latest Ruby Rogues podcast. Listen to the whole thing but starting at 21:45 begins the discussion on where to find the Junior Dev Jobs. I probably rewinded the podcast six times for that segment.

If you are interested in getting a dev job don't delay, get a document open and write down what you have done and keep track of it.

Below is a copy of what my resume looks like as of today:

Brian L Douglas
Palm Harbor, FL
Phone ###-###-####
mail@briandouglas.me
Twitter: @brianllamar

Blog: Bit.ly/c000000de

Education

University of South Florida; B.S. in Finance

Bloc.io Apprenticeship

Github Repos

Chuych, Taskoff, Bloccit32, and Postmarks

Work History

Personal Ruby Web Development October 2013 – Current Created rails application learning TDD and Agile development methods. Learned Rspec, Capybara, and various Ruby gems to build web applications; start to finish. Bloc.io Apprentice Dec 2013 - March 2014 12-week apprenticeship learning the fundamentals of web development. Specializing in Ruby on Rails and Javascript. Working closely with a seasoned mentor on programming concepts like TDD and Agile Development. TD; Sr. Account Manager February 2010 – Current -Conducted sales training and presentations for TD Inside Sales Managers and select resellers to increase mindshare within the IT distribution market.  -Serves as Tech Data's expert on the Business Partner's product line.  -Executes business plans to uncover new opportunities, increase sales and profits for Vendor Partner product lines and Tech Data.  -Performs outbound sales calls to identified target customers/leads in order to quote, provide product information, and build relationships within the Emerson product lines.

CS Skills

Knowledgeable and proficient in  Ruby, Rails, Python, Html, Git, and CSS

New Direction? No just adding more stuff to do.

My original focus for this blog is my journey on getting a dev job. I am now noticing a trend as I find my self being pulled into different directions. I am still very much interested in getting a job as a dev, but I am also very much interested starting this Chuych app officially. I personally do not have the app where I would like and reached out to a contact I made at Ancient City to assist in the development of some advanced features. I am willing to pay this individual, but I also want to make sure that the app is something will take off and stabilize to a certain degree.

I have begun doing some grass-root marketing with Chuych and have created a facebook page in effort to build a community of people to get feedback from people while in beta. I also plan to reach out to churches for partnership (money), this will help kickstart me financially with marketing and development work  as I plan to grow to at least 500 users before the end of the year,  At this point I will need to outsource some day to day and interactions on the site. In my mind this app would have no reason to be successful, but I also know there is a chance things could go bad and it could flounder. Regardless it is definitely worth a try.

This Chuych idea got me started into developing and really the main reason I chose Bloc over other programs. I will begin posting my journey in creating this "startup" on the side. As you all know, I have a background in sales and am also in school to earn an MBA, so it will be exciting to use some of those skill together with my new skill, development.

I wouldn't be a good salesman if I did not ask you to please like my facebook page and let me know what church you attend.

Quick note on my switch from Webrick to Puma

I have heard multiple times not to run WEBrick on heroku or in production but I have never received a reason why I should not until now. Most people recommend Thin or Unicorn due to the flexibility and future proofing your app. If you no plans to update an app after a tutorial or feel you will be using it for more than personal local development use, then there is no issue in sticking with the default.

The recommendation for Heroku is to use Unicorn and their reasoning is due to the use of less dynos. In a production environment your server is de

"If you continue to run WEBrick [in production,] it is likely that requests will take a long time, possibly timeout, and you will need to use many more dynos [on Heroku] than your application requires. Rather than doing this, ensure you use a production web server. A production Ruby web server is capable of handling multiple request concurrently."

Afshin wrote a good article in the study group transcripts a few weeks back that you should check out. 

I personally am now using Puma and liking how fast it spins. I got to a point in my Chuych app where it would take up to 30 seconds just to start development. Its crazy how one little thing can mke a huge difference, but I recommend anyone who is still learning from tutorials or just getting started in Rails to try out a different server other than WEBrick.