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.

3rd time's a charm (Another interview)

I wanted let you all know I had an interview with a third company, which reaches my goal of 3 companies by April. I do have to say ho awesome it has been interviewing with companies and gaining valuable insight from how companies work in the development world. These interviews have confirmed my choice of taking CS169, which I have yet to set up  my VM.

The company I interview with is similar to company #2, where they do not work customer projects, but actually work a few services they sell to their customers. The company that  I have been familiar with for the past 6 months. I originally met 2 individuals from the company at a meetup and then again at the Ancient Rubyconf. They mentioned in passing that I should apply, so I did. I saw a promoted tweet for the job on Twitter and reached out via DM to the CEO. He asked for me to email my resume which I originally submitted on their website but heard no response, so I emailed the CEO directly and got a response late Monday Night (I am glad I emailed the CEO).

The interview very well and I had a great conversation with the head of Engineering, who shared the same name. I learned more about the company, which I will not reveal as of yet, but I will say I do have a second interview coming up in 2 weeks. The company is within driving distance, but it would require me to move to a new city since the commute is entirely too far.

Thank you for reading and thank you for 6 months of support through various means.

New Ruby Newbie Study Group

If anyone is interested, I am hosting a series of events for the next 10 weeks covering the Ruby portion of the Odin project. I am looking forward to learning some more of the Ruby language with others. We will be creating some Ruby applications (Tic Tac Toe) without the assistance of Rails. There will also some testing covered too.

Odin Coursework

This should only take about 10 weeks and will be hosted on a Google Hangout. Please add Ruby Newbies to your circles to get updates.

My first pull request to an open source project

So I have actually never completed a pull request until tonight. I spent a good amount of time trying to troubleshoot why I could not simple push and pull my request. But after some help from a @hopefulwebdev I was able to complete my first pull to an open source project, which isn't exactly on my list of things to do, but it was in the back of my mind.

See my pull here

Here are the steps.

1. Fork the project. You definitely don't want to go messing things up on the main project folder.

2. On the master branch, you want to pull the most updated files in order to make sure all contributors are working on the most recent instance of the project.

=$ git pull upstream

3. In order to make changes, a feature branch is recommend to be made. This will help keep documentation organized.

=$ git checkout -b <feature_branch>

4. Finally make your changes and push the files to github

=$ git push -u origin <feature_branch>

5. Once pushed in Github land, the green pull request button will be available to compare, merge, and leave comments.

Now knowing this is half the battler. go and contribute!

Is there anything I missed?

My first 500 hours

*For those wondering, I have been using the toggl app to keep track of my Ruby studying.

As of last night, I just crossed over my 500th hour, which still quite a while from my 10,000 hours. I hoped to have gain employment in the development field by this point but that might of been pretty aggressive. I am still waiting to hear on the results of my recent interviews, and look forward to hear their feedback.

At the beginning of this year I wrote down my goals and learning materials, which I have listed below.

At a quick glance, I did complete a few of the learning  materials I chose, but there was a lot I completed that was not on my list. The list helped me organize my efforts and focus my learning, rather than just being scattered all over the  place.  I barely even even touch Javascript, other than what I needed to learn to get a working feature in my chuych app. I did however finish CS50x from Harvard, I did not complete any of the C or PHP programming assignments, I did however watch the videos to get a general idea of the language.

As far as my goals for the year, my biggest miss was not contributing to Stack Overflow. I have also not completed any new apps outside of chuych and my goal was to throw together 2 new ones by now. I still plan to create an app I have purchased the domain for called, Mutualfun.io. I will however not complete that many apps each quarter. I will however probably complete more of the Jumpstart Labs tutorials. I feel as if I can get a better understanding of Rails completing those and use that a deadline, rather than my own apps.

My new focus will actually be the Ruby lang as I scale back on some of my Rails learning. I have started exercism.io and will hopefully start Koans too. I need to get a better understanding problem solving in Ruby and the simple creation of command line applications. I find that to be pretty rewarding, but also something companies are looking for.

As far as competencies and how well I think I did:
I think I could have spent more time learning on the basics. I just recently learned loops properly with Python and don't think I ever really grasped the concept of loops in Ruby for a few months. I feel as if I could be in a position get a position as a web dev in the next 3 months.

Reflections after my first 2 interviews

I have interviewed numerous times for my current employer to move up into better positions as well as companies outside, but all within the IT or Finance field. I spent 2 years in a data entry job and had a lot of time to practice my basic interview skills. One interview that I remember completely failing at when I was 23 which helped me to realize that I needed to practice and how to go into an interview prepared. That interview was for Financial Analyst position and I completely failed by not having questions prepared and even brought up salary after the discussion was not going well.

"Why are manhole covers round?" That was asked during the interview. I googled that right when I got to my desk.

I now do not go into an interview without doing extensive research on the company and position. I did the same when interviewing recently.

I complete two interview for 2 separate companies and wanted to share my experiences. I prefer not to share the names in order to not sway any decisions. I am not sure if this is a good practice or not, but my experience is that the hiring managers are pretty down to earth and would be surprise if they read this post. Despite if I get the job or not, I would never do anything to tarnish the name of either company. Just in case you guys are reading.

Company 1:

This company is actually out of state for me and is Agile Web Dev Shop where they work on applications for other medium to large businesses (side note: one of the companies they work with is a company I work with in my current sales role. Well, I thought that was cool ). My initial interview was with the Director of HR/Recruiting, I applied via Glassdoor.com, which I have done numerous times for sales position and have never heard back. This application however receive a response within less than a day.

I am currently in sales and have learned how to read individuals during a sale, and I can do a fare job reading people in person. On the phone is little more difficult, but once I connected with the recruiter on the phone we had a great conversation about the company in general. Everything she explained about it, excited me about the moving to the new city and working/living downtown next to a major MLB stadium, during baseball season. The conversation was great and from what I read into this process was definitely moving forward, but not quite the hard part.

She left me an exercise to complete Conway's Game of Life, which I unfortunately did not complete, well I completed but not on my own and it seemed to be a mess. While trying to use TDD start to finish it took me initially 5 hours just to make the game board. I did not reach out for help after a couple days of realizing I could figure out how to count the live cells and test it. I chose to submit what I had with an explanation on what I did and where my shortfalls are. Working sales you tend to fake it till you make it, but I felt faking it in this instance was not the right option. I did however submit links to my Rails projects, the irony that a of Rails Dev learn is that we know Rails well but hardly know Ruby. I realize this is a shortfall and will be working harder on this.

The recruiter is off on vacation this week, so I will not learn if they would like to proceed until next week. The next step will be interview with the head of developers.

Company 2:

This company is actually in state but about 3.5 hours away from where I live. So it will require me to move if the decision is made to go with me as a candidate. This interview was also over the phone and was with an individual I met at the Ancient City Ruby Conference. The company is smaller and subsidiary of another. All together I was old that they have 12 employees and are working on a sole Rails project. The legacy product was made in .NET and now being restructure into Rails. I had a long conversation about my background and my desire to switch to development. Most of the questions were the same I got while networking at the Ruby conf.

1. Why are looking to switch from Sales to Developing?
2. What interested you in Ruby over other languages to start?
3. Any experience with TDD and Agile development?

I left the phone call confident that I had chance at the second stage, which is Google Hangout with the team. I look forward to the experience it will allow me.

What now:

The easy answer would be wait, but not me. I have already reached out via email keeping them informed of my presence. I have also begun researching the topics I was unsure of with attempting Conways Game of Life and will be following a tutorial this weekend on how to build it to catch the steps I missed.

In another effort to gain more practical Ruby experience I am planning leading the Ruby Newbies group through the Odin Curriculum. The curriculum will help me get to where I need to be, which is a better understanding of Ruby without Rails.

Please join me if you are interest in a weekly study group. It will be a deep dive into Ruby.

Conway's Game of Life problem

After having a nice phone call with a recruiter on Wednesday I was given the assignment to write a program using the rules for Conway's Game of Life. I looked forward to completing this assignment was nervous and excited to start. I previously worked on this problem during the Code Retreat in November. During that that day I approached the problem in a pair with 5 different partners. This definitely helped me in approaching the problem.

The excited got to me and I spent 6 hours on Thursday working through the problem using TDD. This first project using TDD outside of Rails and not following a tutorial, which is why it took me 6 hours to build a board and functionality. I have yet to start the first rule of the game:

1. Any live cell with fewer than two live neighbours dies, as if caused by under-population.
2. Any live cell with two or three live neighbours lives on to the next generation.
3. Any live cell with more than three live neighbours dies, as if by overcrowding.
4. Any dead cell with exactly three live neighbours becomes a live cell, as if by reproduction.

I plan to spend another 6-10 hours on it this weekend. I hope that it does not take that long but am enjoying the experience I am gaining from this. After this I hope to finish my Tic Tac Toe app using TDD, but I might need to give myself a week.

I am currently stuck on check each cell for live cells and adding them to the array called live_neightbors_around. The test is not passing as of yet, but will hopefully will today, now that my brain has rested for a day.

So I applied to a job this week

So I applied to a Ruby job. Though I only have 6 months of experience, I feel I have enough knowledge to keep up in an organization. I sent a tweet out yesterday that was pretty encouraging and help me realize now is the time to apply. Its better to know whether or not I am qualified now after 6 months, that way I can adjust my learning towards where its needed. I am using Joshua Kemp's as my guide on this and he got to about 8 months before he acquired employment as a web dev... getting exciting.

My focus now has been on front end since I feel like I might need to know at least a little in that field. I amplanning on running through a Angular or Ember tutorial soon, as soon as I finish the Hartl or Jumpstart Labs Blogger 2 tutorials.

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.