My tour with Javascript

I have spent this weekend learning some more Javascript using the book Eloquent Javascript. I have not put as much dedication in learning Javascript until very recently. I have worked through part III of the Javascript Roadtrip on Code School which has been challenging, but not hard I previously thought.

I am finding having a basic understanding in Programming and Ruby makes learning more advanced Javascript a lot easier. I am about to begin chapter 8 and very much enjoying this book and the ability to solve exercises in the browser. I am however, having a lot of trouble just figuring my way around solving problems outside of book. I spent 3 hours on the exercism problem that I solved easily in Ruby.

Learning the Javascript way of doings things has proven to be the challenge. For example I am currently trying to figure out enumeration in Javascript, which is easy in Ruby because I know the name of the standard library methods. I just need to find better sources for looking up Javascript functions, `forEach()`.

Friday was another "hackday" where I spent the entire time working on an app for work called "Beer Club." I am part of a club where we all chip in to buy a new keg for the office and seem to be getting hung up on the voting of a new keg. The app would allow us to add multiple beers to a list to eaily vote on.

I unfortunately started the app in Ember and spent most of the day learning how to play nice with the framework. It was a similar experience when I tried to first learn Rails. The day eventually ran out I restarted the app in just Rails with a basic bootstrap template. I am looking forward to finishing this app for obvious reasons and plan to shoe horn Ember in it once the Rails portion is complete.

My plan is is to now switch my focus away from iOS and put all my learning efforts into Javascript, since it is a tool I use at work and will benefit from a lot sooner.

2014 was the year of Ruby for me, I am thinking 2015 will be full of JS.

Ruby Science

Ruby Science is a book written by the popular Rails shop, Thougtbot. I had the opportunity to try out their upcase program a few months ago but cancelled it because it wasn't what I was looking for.

I however have recently acquired their Ruby Science book and absolutely love it. If you like myself, are newer to programming, Ruby, or just look for better ways to write your code, then I highly suggest this book.

I began reading this book last Friday and accidentally read the whole thing by Sunday, it was that good. I have usually taken the approach of reading books slowly and pondering on the concepts to really get them but this book was just too good. It might be hard to tell but I am pretty excited about this book.

I did not realize at first but the way this book is written is sort of a choose your own adventure style, where the book is broken up in 3 sections., Code Smells, Solutions, and Principles.

The Code Smell section is full of code that looks like what I would write, good code but bad practices, for example a "Long Method." Methods are meant to be short 3-7 lines and if they are larger they can probably be refactored. This chapter was so eye opening I went back to a pull request I created that Friday morning and made tons of changes and got some pretty awesome comments from my coworkers on my abstraction, little did they know it was because me reading this book.

The second section is on Solutions. You hear a lot of talks and know the buzzwords about writing clean code, but this book really breaks it down to the point where you just get it. There is definitely no fluff and extravagant examples but I really enjoyed this approach in the book. To get an idea of what I am talking about, the book is as straight as the front cover, right to the point of everything.

The final section is on Principles in programming. I learned what the Law of Demeter was because of this section, as well some other really big terms. I have heard of so many of the terms but never really knew their meanings. I actually knew of the Law of Demeter Concept but did not realize what it was called. It's the idea keeping your method calls to one and not chaining method onto to method on to method, i.e. `run.forest.run` .

When I first started this programming journey, I watched a fair bit of conference talks, most that went over my head. I recently was re-watching CatchupConf, specifically Ben Orenstein's talk on Refactoring and found that so many of those concepts explained that I didn't understand, I now understand and even have been using these past 3 months working as a developer.

Here is a sample of the book: Ruby Science

{}.tap have you seen or used it?

I have never heard of the tap method but am glad I have made the discovery. I planned to use it in my code at work, but have not had the opportunity yet. I find lately I have tried to force many new concepts in my code, but have yet been able to.

Its probably better not to force them. I love the idea of the <=> operator but have not used it once in a real life experience, even in code quizzes. I will probably used the {}.tap method sooner and actually tried it out for the first time yesterday, but ended up taking it out in a refactor.

Check out this blog on the tap.{} method.

I am finding out that there is a right way to Ruby and wish I read Eloquent Ruby a lot earlier. I spent too much time not reading books and going through basics of Ruby. I highly recommend every new Rubyist to read Eloquent Ruby. It is a great guide into Ruby and explains a lot of questions about when to how to write Ruby with best practices.

Well Grounded Rubyist part 1

I had a lot of fun preparing some slide for the WGR book club I am hosting. It is definitely helping me understand the material by forcing my self to discuss via hangout.

For those insterested the slides and vide are below.




Next hangout is in 2 weeks.

One month in again

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.

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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.

Odin Ruby is done but Ruby Newbies is not: Next step is Well Grounding Ruby

Someone mentioned to me in one of the earlier meetings of Ruby Newbies, "I am not sure how newbie I am." It is true the connection to newbie is someone with absolutely no experience with Ruby, but my idea is slightly different.

I have spend the last 4 weeks working on Ruby and learning stuff everyday. There are too many concepts that I have yet to experience, I also am not extremely comfortable with the basics of working in things such as Procs and Lambdas, or even know all the cool syntactical tricks of Ruby. I just finished off a basic C course on Treehouse and a greater appreciation for Ruby. I hope to continue with my learning and work with anyone willing.

My plan now that we have completed the Odin ruby curriculum section is to work through some more Books as well as well live code on problems with the group.  I still have a long way to go on this journey and looking for anyone who wants to join, no matter what the level.

I began reading Confident Ruby by Avdi Grimm and enjoy every page so far. I am finding alot of parallels to the POODR book and even found that Sandi consulted Advi to review the drafts of the book. I am not that far in to share the concepts yet but looking forward to sharing on this in future post.

My plan with the Ruby Newbies is to work through the Well Grounded Rubyist, the book has come highly recommended to me but I never got more than a third of the way through it. My hope is to spend 3-5 weeks on it. My initial though was to go through the first 6 to get out of the beginner explanations and right into the meat of it, but it looks like I might tackle the first 4 chapters and give a talk on it. More details to come.

For those in the Orlando area, specifically orange county. You need to sign up for the free account for Treehouse and Lynda.com. I spent a lot of time during my Lynda.com 7 day free trial and looking forward to view some more advanced concepts and new languages now that I have a little programming under my belt. I am just about finished with my the treehouse section on C and moving onto to Objective-C next.

Use this link Here. Link to the WGR book review event, please RSVP, I am hoping to get at least 5.

learn.thoughtbot.com, I tried it out.

I tried thoughtbot's learnprime, online training material months ago. I never signed up for the paid version but viewed the sample portions of the videos, but always had it on the back burner for things to do. I recently got a marketing email form Ben Orenstein stating I could start the learnprime program at 50% off.

The course is at steep price in my mind, $49 at the mid-tier. I chose to go ahead an try out the program for a month. thoughtbot is a well respected organization and I have always been pleased with their blogpost and podcast. I also have enjoyed the teaching Ben, mainly from viewed conferences talks on Youtube.

I was surprised to find out that the course did not meet my expectations initially. I actually did not even complete workshop before casting judgment, which was unfair. I only ran through the first portion of the iOS workshop and viewed the first half of the Intermediate Rails.

I admit I initially did not give the courses a chance and only skimmed through, but after just about finishing the Intermediate Rails videos. I find that they are worth the amount I paid (which was 50% off). The Rails tutorial was out of date using Rails 3.12.2 and I had issues getting it up and running with the recommend version. I finally just bundled the latest of everything, including Rails 4.1 and did not have a problem.

I eventually completed viewing all videos in the Intermediate Rails group and plan to rewrite the app a little each day. I also started the TDD app/workshop which I will probably complete this week, since it is smaller. Thanks to VLC and the ability to download the video, I have been watching all the videos 2x speed.

My final conclusion after viewing the videos is the content phenomenal and worth the money paid, I however would not recommend it to beginner or anyone just dabbling. I believe the content is great for someone with quite a bit of Rails personal experience in multiple apps/tutorials. I actually review some things I learned at work from others devs including, Single Table Inheritance and Object Oriented Design. I even saw areas of improvement I could bring into my work app, by limiting the dependencies within the controllers.

What I liked about the content is they take time to explain the best practices of Rails and concepts from Sandi Metz's POODR. I couldn't find it better timing since I have been binging on her past Rails talks, now that I have finished her book. I highly recommend her teaching and recommend watching the follow talk at Rails Conf 2013. It is basically a tease of whats in her book.

The TDD workshop is definitely a must for anyone looking to be hired as a Rails dev. Not every company practices TDD, but it is the best walkthrough of Unit and Integration testing I have seen. Even if you write your test last, the way test lines up right with the recommendations of chapter 9 in the POODR book. This workshop is $15 on it's own and definitely worth money.

 This brings to my observation, the cost of learnprime is high but they offer some high level content, which I never took into consideration. The weekly iteration is awesome videos delivered every week, and some info hot topics in the industry to stay cutting edge. Again this is all info for established devs and ones close to becoming established.

I am still on the fence to keep my membership for the iterations alone, as I feel I can finish both workshops before the end of the month. I am definitely appreciative for the content they have provided in the course; but I have no plans in completing any others but very interested in viewing all the iterations.

Getting a little nervous but Senior level in sight

Sitting with exactly 15 days from my start date for my new job and I can honestly say the impostor syndrome is kicking in. I definitely underestimated the amount of work it would take in moving to a city 100miles away. My goal was to install the application for my new job locally in order to mess around with it. Instead I spent time with the family, my dad recently flew in from San Diego to see my son and I have also been getting the new apartment organized.

I have however complete 70% of Ruby Koans. My new position Unit Testing rather than Rspec and I have found it to be a good way to engrain the syntax into my brain. I did however not complete my CS169 coursework until the last minute and it is looking like this week will be the same. The good news is I got boxes last night and plan to move this Saturday. I am not sure if I will get through all the books and tutorials I wanted to, but I think I might be pushing myself too much. Again it is most likely the impostor syndrome pushing to do all this prep work prior but I have secretly created a goal for myself to become a Senior level within a year. I am not necessarily looking to get a new title, but would like to have the skillset of one, which includes Javascript!

This will be a crazy week, but the plan is to complete Koans, Complete 2 Jumpstart Labs rails tutorials, as well as the regular Cs169 and Ruby Newbies work. I also picked up POODR and read through the first 2 chapters, which I highly recommend to all Ruby Newbies.

Thanks for reading and following my journey.

Hired in Week 29

As I write this post it is week 30 of my journey in learning and I have completed 570 hours of my developing journey. I started keeping track of my code about 2 weeks in after reading the book No Degree No Problem by Josh Kemp. After reading the entire book, at work, I created this blog.

In the book Josh mentions that he learned Rails in 8 months of learning how to code on his own to then land a job as a Junior Developer with only 827 hours of learning. In addition to writing this blog I also created a coding log in a Google Doc and recorded every hour I used to learn Ruby. I named the spreadsheet 827 hours as a reminder that I needed to push myself to get at least 3 hours per day in learning, so much that some weekends were consumed code review  and error debugging. My goals was to have a Jr developer position within 1 year, October 31,2014 and was later changed to May after I completed Boc.

As of Friday I received an offer for a full-time Rails position at a company in the state I am in and it took 568 (7months) hours to do it. *I do not mention the amount hours because of competition, but to put in perspective that anyone can do this. I worked 40+ a week and put in 35 hrs a week coding.

No more sales, Now more rails was my tweet earlier today, Because I will now be spending 40 hours a week writing code and not dreaming about it while doing sales. I hope to continue to push myself past that "senior" level position into something pretty awesome.

*This blog is about 5 times longer and was starting to look like a book. I will be breaking it into multiple blog posts and have them released separately, so subscribe to the RSS or my Twitter to get the full developing story of how I got my first dev job.


Thanks and Attributions in no particular order:
@madibird
@bnlson
+horvathlg
@ashfinator
+Erik Trautman
TheOdinProject
@trybloc
+Adam Louis
@AncientCityRuby
@jdotvazquez
@joshuakemp01
@surgerunner
@onemonthrails
@jterrell
@hopefulwebdev
@kiy_tang
@_russellb
@Allolex
@ByENNEN
@kytrinyx
@thedevme
Tampa Ruby Brigade
@jesus
@parndt
+everyone who reads this blog!
...I am sure there are more, but I could not make it this far without the encourage and support I got from you.

If anyone is interested hearing more of my story, I might do another Q&A on Youtube or Reddit, if there is enough interest.

Preparing for the Interview

Thus far I have only made it to phone interviews and I have yet to get past the second interview in the process. I find my rapport and presence in the interview pretty good, but my concept of key programming concepts have been lacking, especially when explaining my incomplete version of the Game of Life. I have an extreme thirst for knowledge, so I do not regret going to the interview and not being able to answer the questions. I actually see these questions guidance to know what to learn next.

In my interview last, the idea of Metaprogramming came up, so I got the book and I am now on chapter of a surprisingly small book. I failed to even get the interest of a recruiter 3 months ago because of my lack basic Ruby concepts, but I changed that and now lead the Ruby Study Group because I saw a need for me to get that better understanding.

I look forward to my interview and finishing the day reading Ace Programming Interview

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.

I am now Back Stateside and missed the internet

I thought I would of got more rails work done last week, but I underestimated the workload while in costa Rica. The trip was a lot of fun but its time to get back to work. I also did not expect to not have wifi on an international flight, which made it impossible to debug or research.

I did on the other hand get through half of the The Book of Ruby. I like it because it basically a Ruby definition book. I like Whys Poignant Guide, which I used previously, but find it hard to reference or review for specific info. The Book Ruby lays out all the elements of Ruby and makes it easy to reference. After reviewing the book over the week I was able realize stuff I had already forgotten.

I learned Ruby pretty hard 7 weeks ago in the beginning of block but have been implementing Rails since. I find it important to review the basics periodically especially now, since I can now implement more things.

Currently working on a Tic Tac Toe game, which I could not do last week due to the lack of internet and research. *When I had internet I had to do my day job work.

Took me forever to figure out how to list Board = [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 ] in



I am currently right on schedule with the Bloc program. Each new element of Blocmarks has me going on a rabbit hole to learn something else. My current place is creating post from email.

At this point I will most likely not attempt the other two projects but will move on to the capstone. I am looking forward to starting work on a Church related app. I will write more details on what it will be this week, once I write my plan out.

One thing that caused a lot of delay was building my own solutions and not using Ruby Gems. I understand the importance of learning how code works together, but I love implementing gems and moving. I have also realize I like creating apps and figuring out the best course actions to complete. I might attempt freelancing after Bloc, maybe find a small project to work on.

Things to do: Taskoff and Rspec Book by Aaron Sumners.

I had to postpone my Test Driven Development due to fact of my Rspec learning curve. I was getting a little confused on how to describe the certain functions in the test spec file, but I did pick a book from Everdayrails which should only take a few hours to complete. My hope is once I complete that tonight I will have a better understanding of TDD and follow with it throughout the entire app.

My Taskoff app is going well for the most part, not too bad for no training wheels. I also got stuck on presenting the time left for the task (Each task will be destroyed after 7 days if not completed).

I will also need to postpone my Blocmarks app which I planned to begin with my mentor. I got a lot to work on today

Secret Rspec training

So I have moved on to working on pseudo client work.

I am considering applying to web developing apprenticeship and understand I need to learn best practices for ROR, aka "test driven development". My mentor recommended a rspec tutorial that segways perfectly into a client app. The tutorial is not posted in the Bloc curriculum, but my mentor sent me the guts of it. You can follow that process in my repo called Taskitoff (To Do app that auto deletes task after 7 days).

I am about just finished the setting up the app and will be attempting to create the Task Controllers with the said functionality. I am excited to see how it turns out, judging by the list I posted in my readme.md...thie shouldn't be too hard to complete.

*I will also be learning what this Capybara is all about.

Learning Ruby The Hardway

As I am now on my second week of Bloc, I have found my self pacing through the first portion rather quickly. In order to supplement my learning I have opted to also go through the Zed Shaw book, Learn Ruby the Hardway. I am very pleased with the different exercises thus far (52 in total).

I am currently only on #13, but like to complete them while watching television as a sort of winding down for the day...if you can call it that. I also like the fact that the comments below each exercise add more value to the book by going even further in depth. If you decide to use this tool check out this guys blog where he also outlines every exercise while he went through the book.

Code Time:

I did not mention prior in any other post but I put in 94 hours of coding practice/training into Ruby/Javascript prior to Bloc. Bloc has a requirement of at least 25 hours per week, which I completed 26.5 (My personal goal was 35, but I might be a little over zealous). I have placed my Bloc coding time on a seperate Google Doc and will share in a future post.

*The 827 hours is a goal I got from Joshua Kemp and his book.

Unlikely Developer/Review: Book

I just got done reading a great book called, No Degree, No Problem by Josh Kemp. The book in it's entirety is all about Josh's experience in making the career change from Blacksmith in Virginia to Jr. developer in only 8 months. I only found his blog yesterday and was already inspired to created my first post on this blog. Now that I have read his book, I am now even more inspired to follow through with this Journey.

A Few Take Aways from the book

1. I need to pick a date when I am making this career change.
This is interesting because I am literally in my first semester for my MBA and its currently being paid by my employer (I have a degree in Finance). Rather than aim for Josh's 8 months, my plan is to make it a 12 months experience of  hardcore studying and programming. This might change in the future to be sooner, but at least by then I will have a full year of my MBA and programming under my belt. The MBA might come in handy if I start one of my business ideas.

The date is 10/21/2014

2. Stay focused
Josh outlines in his book how he spent 3 hours every night strictly dedicated to learning, even with two young kids; I can relate with having a 3 month year old son myself. This blog will not only double as my accountability to get that done, but it will also host my coding log. My goal is to keep up with the 3 hours of coding per day.

3. Meet People
I currently work in IT sales and understand networking. It is important to know people if you want your business to grow. I plan to attend my first meetup in Orlando next week and hope to meet individuals with like minds, that will assist in my journey to learn code.

Get the ebook today for only $5 bucks and prepared to be inspired. Use the link I provided below.


No Degree, No Problem

Visit my daily coding log here.