Middleman Blog in store

I finally completed a Middleman Blog from start to sort of finish. Middleman is an easy to use framework for building static sites. I have been in the need of transferring this blog elsewhere but do not want to get stuck in the rut of building a ship while you use.

My fear was always getting too involved in the process of building the blog and never writing blog post. That is why I am happy to start hosting my podcast there at first. FYI, developingstory.link is my middleman site.

I was actually able to get it started rather quickly using the middleman and middleman-blog gems.

Once the blog was set up I had no problem creating my first post and setting the bootstrap (yes I did it) template. The challenge will be migrating the post from here to the new site, but I am holding off until I am confident I won't be working on the bike shed color rather than writing post.

- I will definitely be looking forward to add syntax highlighted code samples to the blog.

Thanks for reading and checking out the podcast. The plan is to have episodes out every Friday, so look for the next one this week.

In the meantime checkout Middleman and checkout fellow a Ruby Newbie, Colby's, impressive Middleman blog

RVM

Just had the worst experience trying to install rails and RVM with #Mavericks. Currently downgrading to Mountain Lion :(
— Brian Douglas (@brianllamar) November 24, 2013

I wrote this tweet during my first month into web developing learning. Looking back now I can laugh at my ignorance, because I absolutely love RVM and being able to switch my rubies on the fly. It took some time but I now feel a lot better at working in the command line and installing package like RVM.

I recently spent some time pairing with a fellow Code Newbie and found RVM to be very helpful in debugging their issues.

If you are using or learning Ruby I highly recommend the use of RVM.

Use this path to install RVM:

$ \curl -sSL https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable

*If you ever want to find old tweets, use this link

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.

Reading Rails Group

My originally idea for the next Ruby Newbie activity was to read different Ruby libraries, but I found it hard to find new and interesting libraries to check out. I chose the Inflector Library because it was a library I started looking into at work but as I read through it I found out it was a Rails library.

I have avoided Rails and it components when doing new things for Ruby Newbies and trying to stay focused on learning the concepts of Ruby, but at the end of the day Rails is Ruby and thats why I plan to hold a new event on the off weeks of the book club, called Reading Rails.

Rails is made up of 7 main components and the first component we will be reading through will be the Active Model. I am excited to finally jump into reading Rails core libraries and hopefully demystifying it. If you are available please join the discussion this Sunday.

There will not be a requirement for joining, just a basic understanding of Ruby.

Why I love Koans

I originally downloaded the Ruby Koans repo a month ago, but did not complete any of them till 2 weeks ago when I completed 3. I originally downloaded because of Chong's video on youtube, How to learn a language quickly, which has mysteriously disappeared. His recommendation was to complete the Koans to help get an understanding for the language and quickly. The simple puzzles help tease the brain and build muscle memory to solve the short problems.

I recently finished all 280 of the problems yesterday, over the course of 4 days, and am glad I did. Not only did I get more exposure to unit testing, I also got to take a tour of the Ruby-Lang by solving problems in all aspects of it.

The beauty of the Koans is you actually do not need to know much on Ruby, you actually learn by completing the problems and reading the tests. A lot of people fill in crossword puzzles in the morning to help exercise the brain, Koans does the same and has just encourage my learning to more on Ruby. Some things I did breeze by once solved, but I looking into how messages are passed in methods and also the method missing functionality.

Now that I have exposure to these concepts, reading through the books Eloquent Ruby, and POODR will make more sense the first time through.

My next goal is to now start on Exercism.io and finish the Ruby Monk courses. There is also Katas with codewars which I will be checking out. I originally found them to be too hard, but am ready to give them a try now.

Project Euler problem set

I reached out to a company randomly on twitter asking if they were hiring. They surprisingly responded right away letting me know that I can apply and they will reach out. Prior to me even submitting my resume the CTO reached out to me confirming their interest in speaking with me.

The coding challenge provided include a extremely long questionnaire which I complete after the Ruby Newbie group on Monday. There was a lot of info I was not sure of, mainly in the Front End section, which confirms I need to take a look at that. I did not get a chance to start the 5 problem sets until Tues and it took me an hour to complete the first. The problems are from the Project Euler set and as it says on the the site, once you solve one problem, it gives you a tool to solve the next problem set.

I honestly did not read that before I began and wish I did, because I indeed use tools or approaches from previous problems to solve the next, so if you are attempting, it is good to work in order.

I submitted my problem set to the CTO and am now waiting on the response from them.

Some useful things I learned was to use the Ruby Docs! I completed the first problem with limited Google but quickly found that next one required a lot of reading on Mathematical concepts, which I enjoyed. Not that you need to know a lot of math to program, these problems do require it. I ended up using Ruby magic to solve, which hope is not counted against me. For the Fibonacci theory, I was able to define how to create a Fibonacci number with a loop but for some reason got stuck on how to limit that number to max = 4_000_000. I prefer not to post the code for this in my blog but encourage you to try out problem #2 your self.

I also learning more things like what a stack overflow actually is? Which I got while trying to find the least common multiple for all numbers 1...20

If you don't get it in a couple hours you can check out my github which I have provided notation for what

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nesting Routes and Learning Basic Ruby again

Chuych

I spent a good amount of last week working on a error with nesting my routes in the Chuych App. I had a goal of making every user submit a post associated with/without a church, but my other goal was to make the app a minimal viable product. I have decide to nest my route post route in my church route. This makes sense with the association of post to churches. I have also gave up on the idea that anyone can make a general post. I will revisit that later when I have time, my main focus is getting the app complete.

My was due to me not properly calling the nested posted in the church/show.rb



My only task that need completing are the implementation of gmaps for rails and markers, as well as everything Front End. I will most likely just update the app with some bootstrap, my attempt to include the Amoeba template did not implement very clean. I plan to strip out all the assets today and start from scratch.


Ruby Newbies

I have began scheduling a regular Weekend Hangout. The focus will be on Ruby and actually solving real problems in Ruby. I applied to an apprenticeship a month ago only to find out I could not create a Tic Tac Toe app in Ruby without searching extensively in Google. I could get the basics of building the Tic Tac Toe board and a move but that took me 3 weeks.

My goal for the group is get through the Chris Pine Learn to Program Exercises. I have spent a focus on learning Rails, I now need to re-focus on Ruby and solving simple problems.

Started Python and hopefully pairing

Python

I began an Intro to Programming course this week and the focus is actually on Python. I am not sure if I mentioned this before but my wife has one class to complete her Associates degree at our local community college. She has been taking photography classes up until my son was born, but took off last semester. She has no interest in going back to school now my son is here, and I don't blame her, he is pretty awesome. I offered to take her last class for her and chose this course. This should be fun since I have never had a formal programming class and have already breezed through the material.

I have also breezed through the Python Course on Codecademy. I heard how similar Python is compared to Ruby, so far I have seen no differences. Python is sensitive to whitespace and is the only difference I have seen thus far.

On the Ruby Front

I had to cancel my Ruby meetup on Monday due to the lack of time I have spent on Ruby. I went from waking up at 4am every morning to waking up at 6am after Bloc ended. I am enjoying sleeping, but it seems I will need to start waking up earlier. Last week I barely hit 14 hours which is almost half of what I did my best week.

I plan to meet new people this week and the coming and conduct some pairing sessions. The Odin group has proven to be very valuable to meeting new individuals learning Ruby.

My focus for the next few weeks will be on learning Ruby, specifically solving problems. Since the Ruby Newbie's inception, I have not had a clear idea on what the focus will be. I have now decided that is will focus on learning Ruby. primarily learning through code quizzes and group book reviews.

I feel that I now have decent skills in Rails and need to focus more on Ruby in order build on my proficiency.

Please join me on Odin and RN if you are looking to learn too.

Use Vagrant to install Ruby on Windows

Vagrant/Microsoft presentation

A month ago I attended a meetup the speaker spoke on installing Ruby on windows using vagrant. I have not had the opportunity to use Ruby on windows but I hear its pretty difficult getting up and running.

The windows computer I use is my work laptop is my work computer and I have no plans installing vagrant or ruby on that but I thought I should share this to anyone interested.

RuningOutOfTime:Error

I did not expect to take this long on my current app but I also did not expect to be so busy with my day job...Another reason why I am pushing to get an apprenticeship. Costa Rica really put a real delay in my learning rails. I have also been given more responsibility and task to complete within my position and it has caused me to work longer during the day and at home...

My hope is to start an apprenticeship by April and anxiously waiting on their responses. I look forward to the day where I can focus on program during the day rather than late nights and early mornings.

My current error involves the connection between Griddler and Cloudmailin... I am trying to create a Bookmark from an email. This app has introduced few new elements and they have all thrown me for a loop, which is good.

I am trying to figure out how to parse the data from the email into the bookmarks table. Sounds easy in my head but I am stuck on the syntax and ambiguous gem file docs. With my work schedule, I have also not had much contact with my mentor to really discuss. I have a message out to him on this and eagerly wait on the solution.

1. Griddler Gem
2. Cloumailin
3. Devise like user Authentication without the use of gem.
4. Embedly Gem

I hope to have this complete this weekend and have 3 weeks to complete my capstone project. I did want to attempt the Blocapedia app project, but will have access to the instructions post Bloc and can complete it then. I have a strong desire to complete my capstone and it will have some Blocapedia functionality anyway.

Now, Back to focusing on the app. Monday marks only 3 weeks left of Bloc, sad and excited at the same time.

Bundler::GemfileNotFound

I saw this error while working on the airplane last week, I found the following Stack Overflow question. 

Bundler::GemfileNotFound

My first thought was that I messed something up in my gem file, but a quick search shows that you need to install bundler gem.

install rubygems-bundler

This is confusing since I my app was created using "rails new"

I scrolled down further and found an answer stating the following: "cd into a directory that has a Gemfile"

I was not in the correct folder and I did the same thing this morning. Since I had o look this up twice I thought I would share on my blog in case someone else has the same issue. 

The actual answer was voted 51 times, but was not at the top of the page. Prior to this SO question I would juts look for the first answer but now I will be scrolling down to read all the answers. I realize the right answer might not always be the first. 

Started the Ruby Newbie Communtiy

Last weekend the Ruby Newbie Google plus group held it's first hangout. The idea came after realizing that there still is a large amount of individuals deciding to learn Ruby just as I am. I also realize that programming last only as long as the community does so in order to hedge my decision in learning Ruby I would love the opportunity to assist others in learning with me.

I have played music most of my life as well as sports and know that when you surround your self with others with the same goal or passion your skill level increases at faster rate.

That is my goal with this group and I hope to see you this weekend at the Hangout. It will be focused on "How much time do you spend learning? " and "What do you use to track your time?"
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On another note I have applied to a couple apprenticeships, 3 to be exact. They are all highly sought after apprenticeships. I have 5 weeks left and imagine that I can prepare enough for the interview in the meantime.

Things I learned last week.

Implement user authentication without using the devise gem. I also signed up for railscast in preparation to business trip to Costa Rica. I am actually looking forward to being on a plane where I can dedicated some time learning some new things.

Shout out to my mentor. Learn more about Active Record.

I just feel like I need to give a shout out to my Mentor for Bloc. I have previously left his name out of my posting to protect his privacy, but I realize that is silly. My mentor is Adam. If you have an interest in Bloc I highly recommend this guy. I can go on and on about how smart he is but check out his mentor page on Bloc. His knowledge on Ruby is very vast and has an innate ability to go in depth on a multitude of topics in programming.

I am currently implementing a has_and_belongs_to_many relationship between my bookmarks and tags within my current project. I still have to implement posting from email and add user a devise like user authentication without using the devise gem. My goal is to complete this all by this weekend and move on to Blockepedia on Monday. We will see how it all goes.

This is officially week 7 of my Bloc Mentorship which gives me 5 weeks to complete these two projects in addition to my capstone project.