Hack Job

Learning to code, startups, and other cool stuff.

[brentraines]

Big Picture, Small Startup

If you stare too closely at a picture for long enough, you can forget what it actually looks like. Between Will’s talk yesterday and my check-in with Jeremy I was able to take a step back and remember why I am actually here. I didn’t quit my job and start this insane journey just to become a web-developer. I joined SIB to give myself the best possible chance of finding a company that aligns with my personal goals and that is doing something I can share a passion for. They also have to like me enough to hire me, but let’s be honest… what’s not to like (don’t be honest).

My BHAG (Big Hairy Audacious Goal) puts me as a founder/co-founder of a company ten years from now. As Will said, the best I can do right now is point my cannon in that direction. For good or bad (good for ramen noodle stock, bad for my bank account), that direction seems to be in the land of small, lowly funded startups. Unfortunately, realizing what my target company is doesn’t make it any easier finding a job. Fortunately Startup Institute and Krash are allowing me the opportunities to rapidly grow my network, which I’m hoping will eventually lead me to this company.

So I want to work for a small startup that will:

allow me to grow with the company…

give me many different hats (not just a developer hat)…

is doing something I think is awesome…

and is a “cultural fit”.

I won’t be upset if they provide a kegerator full of craft beer, but I don’t require it. With all these limitations, it will be easy to fall back into a comfortable place and take a job that sort of, almost, kind of feels right (especially if they provide free lunch and have a ping pong table!). For all of us, I’m sure that will be a very real temptation. When that demon comes knocking at your door, remember those goals and priorities you wrote down... then punch him in the face. Also remember Miro Kazakoff’s talk about the CEO who hired a good person that just wasn’t a good fit (if you weren't lucky enough to be there, it was a very compelling story)… no fun for either party. Don’t accept anything less than what feels right.

As for where my passion lies… I have yet to clearly define that. I seem to be drawn to using technology to connect people. Not social media, but something more real. I found One Mighty Roar really interesting at the partner fair this week. The original idea that got me into building web sites was something like TaskRabbit. My next idea was similar to KitchenSurfing, and I’m currently working on a platform for a karma based sharing system/economy. I feel that everyone has something useful to give, whether it’s a skill, an item, or just some free time, and these are generally wasted resources with an enormous potential.

So what have I learned so far this week? Take a step back, remember why you’re here, and put on some pants (Allan)!

In the words of the late great philosopher Mitch Hedberg:

“I’m tired of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re goin’ and hook up with them later.”

[brentraines]

SIB: Get pumped! - Day 3

The first three days at SIB have been amazing! I have met so many exciting people already, from classmates to alumni to guest speakers. Everyone is anxious to get started with the partner projects and the in-track curriculum.

We kicked off the first day with an introduction from Allan Telio. He had us take a post-it note and write down our answer to ‘What does success look like to you?’. Success means a lot of things to a lot of people, but to me it means getting up every morning and being excited about the day ahead. I want be able to start my day believing that what I'm going to do will change the world, even if it's just a small change. Obviously there will be some days that just suck… but if I can minimize those and keep the number of sucky days far less than the awesome ones, I feel pretty successful. He also asked what our definition of risk was. Again, many people have different definitions of risk in their own lives, and many have different levels of tolerance for risk. I’m still not exactly sure what defines risk for me. There is an obvious level of financial risk leaving a paying job to attend a school that costs money and enter a career field that I have absolutely no professional experience in. At the same time, it doesn’t feel like a risk at all. With the amount of passion and determination that continues to grow and drives me toward my goals, there is no doubt in my mind that I will get there. The only uncertainty is how long it takes me to get there. I just have to continue to be patient, and continue pushing myself towards that goal. There was a statement that Allan made that I hope everyone takes to heart, not just for the program, but throughout their careers. “Don’t make this more important than it needs to be, keep things in perspective.” Everyone will be working extremely hard during the next eight weeks, and much longer if they choose the startup route, but it is important not to forget about life outside this bubble (family, friends, sanity... take a break before getting burnt out). This is probably especially true for developers, since we tend to get lost in our code for hours and possibly days on end (there are things other than coding).

A big theme so far has been “Don’t be a jerk”. I would think that’s pretty self-explanatory when you’re trying to get a job from someone, but apparently past experience says otherwise. Miro Kazakoff spoke about getting an interview, getting another interview, and… getting more interviews. My favorite part of his talk was a very counter-intuitive approach to getting an interview at a company that could be a real fit for you.

“You’d rather have one person feel passionate about you than many people feel ok.”

Don’t be rude, but be yourself, be opinionated, be real. You will scare away a lot of people in doing this, but the ones you don’t scare away are going to love you and they will most likely be a good fit. Day two was wrapped up with an alumni happy hour. Big thanks to them for showing up (the keg of beer probably didn't hurt) and letting us get to know some of them.

Caroline da Cunha led a talk on emotional intelligence. It was a lot of common sense, but also involved a conscious approach to learning and practicing new habits, as well as un-learning bad habits. We wrote down one behavior that we will practice un-learning over the next week. Mine was occasionally being shy and not always approaching people or participating actively in a conversation (now anyone that reads this can hold me accountable). Joanna Vinick gave a great presentation on how to take advantage of the growing Startup Institute network.

Things to do during an interview (coffee chat):

Listen and pay attention

Be on time

Be inquisitive

Be yourself

Things not to do:

Chew gum

Be late

Hearing, not listening

Use terms incorrectly

I could’ve been one of those annoying gum chewers. Thank you Joanna… bullet narrowly missed. She also introduced everyone to some powerful stalking tools online to learn more about someone before you meet with them. There were also four alumni that took time out of their day to come in and allow us to do mock coffee chats with them (thank you to those people).

I got the question from one of the alumnis at the happy hour, “What color are you?”. I thought it was pretty obvious what color I was, and kind of an odd question, but it turned out he meant something else. Be careful if you ever ask that question... someone may end up taking it the wrong way. When he found out we hadn’t had the talk yet he just told me to wait and listen to Katie Rae give it, because she was the perfect person to hear it from. He was right. There are four colors (personalities) that everyone possesses, some more than others. Everyone has a dominate color and then a second, and so on. Some colors work better with others or for others. Sometimes you have to put on another color temporarily to accomplish certain things (meet deadlines, rally your team, etc.). I am definitely green with blue second, although I think I cross into red when I am in a time-sensitive situation and yellow when I’m around very strong yellows.

Day three ended with a fireside chat by Per Sandell and Cheryll Morris from Nanigans. It was amazing to hear that Nanigans has grown from a company of four in 2010 to 150 employees today, with 110 in Boston! Even more impressive was they did this with only ~$9.6M between series A and A1 funding. Nanigans has some very cool technology and I’m sure it would be extremely interesting diving into some of their code to take a look (if I didn’t get lost).

Tomorrow we will finally discover who our team is, and what partner project we’ve been assigned. I’m just as anxious as everyone else, and can’t wait to get started. The other super exciting thing is the IdeaHack tomorrow. We actually get a chance to work on a project with our team in a mini Hackathon style competition over a 24 hour period.

Thanks to everyone that has made the last 3 days so great, and thanks to anyone that has read this entire post. The next 8 weeks are going to be life-changing, and I can't wait to see what comes next!

Brent

[brentraines]

Taste of Eship with Bill Warner

Last night we had Bill Warner come to Taste of Eship at Krashpad Central. Bill is the founder of Avid Technology, Inc. and Wildfire Communications, Inc., FutureBoston, Inc, and Warner Research, LLC. He has already accomplished so many great things during his lifetime, but I want to focus more on his talk last night. If you would like to find out more about him, you can go here: Bill Warner.

Bill started the discussion talking about growing up in New Jersey and how amazing he thought Boston was when he first came here to attend MIT. He even went as far as saying that “Boston is the best city in the world to start something”, but that it has also really changed and grown over just the last 5 years.

Bill got hurt diving at a young age, and ended up in rehab. He credits his entire career to that room he stayed in at the rehab center in 1974. He couldn’t feel sorry for himself, with two roommates that were paraplegics with much less mobility. Bill said, “You’re going to come to low points in your life… but the great thing about the low points is all the high points”. Tom, one of his roommates, was paralyzed from the neck down. He called his girlfriend every night, but someone had to prop the phone up to his head. The only problem with this was that Tom couldn’t hang up the phone when he was done. Bill had no experience in engineering (he was an economics major at St. Louis), but he decided he could do something about Tom’s problem. He went out and bought a whistle switch, and made it so that Tom could use it to turn a light on and off. This triggered someone to come and hang up the phone for him. Back then there was no internet, so Bill had to go in his wheelchair down to Canal Street in New York to get a sequencer. At that time he didn’t even know what a sequencer was. The guy at the store would ask him, “You mean a stepping relay?”, “Oh yea, a stepping relay!”.

In 1975, a man came into his dad’s shop by the name of John Bell and told Bill’s dad to send Bill by his shop. He had a garage for a shop and was building ECL switches, which Bill said,

“was like doing cocaine upside down, it was crazy!”

ECL was the fastest, baddest electronics there were, and no one could get them to work. No one was doing digital in 1975. When Bill arrived at the shop, he was sent over to a guy that called himself a dirt farmer from Alabama. The man handed him a book titled “Signetics Guide to 7400 Chips” and said that was all he ever needed. After that Bill got to work, eventually attended MIT, and continued down the path to where he is now.

He credits a lot of where he is today to that “crazy” man, John Bell, who took a 19 year old in to do something that should’ve been done by someone with a Masters or PhD. The main point with all of Bill’s stories was a one he kept driving at. He said, “you just need to go, and things will happen”. You’re not going to lay out this big course and say, ‘I need an investor for this, and a cofounder for this, and…’. Even if you could lay it all out and it work out, it would still suck… and that’s because your plan would suck, because you don’t know what you want. “Stop planning, stop seeking, seeking sucks. If you seek, they (everyone that could potentially help you) will hide.”

One of the questions was asked, “If there’s this random chain of events that can lead you to success, how do you pick and choose which paths to follow?” Bill said that it comes down to a source of energy that’s in you. Build on that positive energy… build your team, build your product, etc. “That energy I like to call intention. When people can feel that positive energy, they want to help, and they want to join in. It’s about doing things where you’re adding to the positive. But there’s also a negative, where ‘that doesn’t feel right to me’.” If something doesn’t feel right, there’s no need to say no… say, “That doesn’t feel right to me.” What does that do? It opens up a discussion where you may come to a new understanding on what does feel right. If you have this approach, you’re going to end up with this huge array of things that feel right in front of you that you’re going to be picking from. “It’s like being able to pick only from the winning slot machines, and then being able pick the ones that pay out the most.”

Bill was a great speaker, very genuine, and a joy to be around. A big thanks to him for stopping by Krash and hanging out.

Thanks for reading,

Brent

[brentraines]

Learning Ruby

I’ve been working on ProjectEuler most of the day. I finished another four today, and I’m now on Problem 15. They are starting to get a little harder (for me at least). My solutions are on github here: ProjectEuler.

I’ve decided to take a break and talk a little about getting started with Ruby. My first exposure to Ruby was on CodeSchool with the Try Ruby tutorial (now CodeSchool has the RubyBits courses, but I started them and wasn't a huge fan). I hated it, and it just didn’t seem to make sense to me. A few months later I found out I was going to have to learn it for Startup Institute so I bit the bullet and decided to just bang my head against the wall until it made sense.

I was on a tight deadline and had to learn quickly, so I started with Codecademy on a Friday morning… and finished all of the lessons by Friday night.  I became much more familiar with the syntax, and it seemed to start making sense pretty quickly. I gained familiarity with the syntax from the Codecademy lessons but still had a vague understanding of many concepts. My goal was to learn enough so I could start building an app in Rails, and I would become a better Rubyist as I went.

Saturday morning I started with The Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. I spent every spare moment I had working through that book, doing all of the extra challenges, and I finished 6 days later. I didn’t always understand everything, but I kept on chugging, hoping it would all start to make sense eventually. By the time I finished the book, I felt like I was ready to build anything… until Sublime was staring at me, hungry for some code.

It took me about two straight days of frustration before I had even the smallest success. I was building an app using the Twitter API, and I had finally pieced together a working Twitter sign-in using O-Auth. After that one success though, everything seemed much easier. Every problem that came up was just another challenge, and I became better at solving the problems using online resources. I think the hardest part starting out was knowing what questions to ask.

After a few Rails apps, I’ve started diving more into Ruby. I just learned about RubyMonk recently, and I am loving it (I think it's the best resource for learning Ruby I've seen). I’ve been bouncing back and forth between ProjectEuler and RubyMonk, trying to apply what I’ve been learning to the problems. It’s also been extremely helpful just reading the Ruby Docs and playing around in IRB.

Bottom line: Just keep doing the exercises and move on to something more challenging as soon as you have a basic understanding (if you stay in your comfort zone, you’re never going to get better). If you don’t understand a specific concept, move past it and come back later. You’ll probably have an AHA! moment while you’re working on something else anyways.

As always, what worked for me might not work for you. I think most people will find once you get over that initial intimidating start (staring at the blank screen), things start clicking and it becomes much more fun.

Thanks for reading,

Brent

[brentraines]

Wicked Good Ruby Conf 2013 Presentations and Videos

Slides:

Hacking your Home with Ruby by Justin Campbell

Ruby: The Next Generation by Mark Sobkowicz

Supercharging ActiveRecord with PostgreSQL by Dan McClain

MRI Magic Tricks by Charlie Somerville

Bloom: A Language for Disorderly Distributed Programming by Christopher Meiklejohn

What Even is an Erlang? by Christopher Meiklejohn

Integrating Angular.js with Rails by Jonathan Linowes

Writing DSLs with Parslet by Jason Garber

Active Record is Still Magical by Neeraj Singh

Dissecting Ruby with Ruby by Richard Schneeman

Using Ruby to Automate your Life  (Gist) by Seth Vargo

Rails Sojourn: One Man's Journey by Mike Desjardins

RubyMotion: Under the Hood by Joshua Ballanco

Naming is Hard by Jon Yurek

Machine Learning by Bryan Liles

Videos:

Wicked Good Ruby Conf 2013 Presentation Videos on Confreaks.com

Blog Posts:

Wicked Good Wrap Up by Michael Denomy

Thoughts on Wicked Good Ruby by EKH

Don't Play Football with a Basketball by Wyatt Greene

Wicked Good Ruby From a Newb's Perspective by Brent Raines

leaps || bounds: Wicked Good Ruby Conf Roundup by Mike Leone

[brentraines]

Wicked Good Ruby From a Newb's Perspective

The Wicked Good Ruby Conference this weekend was awesome! I had a blast meeting some amazing new people and learned a lot . There were so many great presentations it was hard to choose which ones to attend. This is going to be a long post, so I’ll get straight to the good stuff.

Here are some of the key points I took away from this weekend’s presentations:

Dan Sharp – DRYing up RSpec

Don’t DRY too early, wait for duplication before you undupe

Don’t sacrifice readability or understandability

Don’t start with shared examples until your tests are green

Use names that read well

Use described_class (describe MyClass do)

Pass in vars for more customization

Alex Rothenberg – Using Ruby to write Integration Tests for your iOS Apps

Calaba.sh – Capybara for mobile apps (both Android and iOS); supports Cucumber

Bradley Sheehan – Becoming a Developer

Very interesting talk on attending G School and being able to now call himself a “developer”. Discussed the concept of "Shoshin", a beginner's mind. In a beginner's mind, there are more possibilities.

Sean Hussey – Know your Audience

"When you meet with opposition, even if it should be from your husband or your children, endeavor to overcome it by argument and not by authority, for a victory dependent upon authority is unreal and illusory."

- Bertrand Russell, 10 Commandments of teaching

Know your audience

Think about what they want to hear

Talk to their concerns

Prepare to be wrong anyway

Matt Aimonetti – Wicked Bad Ruby

There is no bad Ruby, so there must also be no good Ruby.

Good & bad belong in religion, philosophy, and ethics.

The keys to writing code that works:

Define your expected outcome

Evaluate the solutions

Implement

Re-evaluate

“Don’t write code, materialize ideas”

Joshua Ballanco – RubyMotion: Under the Hood

RubyMotion uses ruby to build native apps for iOS and OS X. It interfaces directly with Obj-C libraries, and is a CLI based build system.

MacRuby:

Intended to be implementation of Ruby 2.0 for OS X

Target rubyspec compliance

JIT (just in time) or AOT (ahead of time) compiled

Uses libauto for garbage Collection

RubyMotion:

Descendant of MacRuby

Static Compiled

Retain/release reference counting, instead of garbage collecting

Rubymotion objects are Obj-C objects

Jon Yurek – Naming is Hard

Don’t name something for what it does, name it for why it’s there.

Reveal your intentions

Be specific

Less specific to more specific as you go down

Document your documentation

A test’s name should be its justification

Dan Sharp – Killing Fibonacci

Dan talked about his path to enlightenment from Dan ’05 to Dan ’13 and learning the value of testing. Here are his 10 tips for learning to test properly and using testing to create a good product.

Have courage, conquer the fear – Start writing tests now

Find your peace (find your green) – Get your current tests to pass, and then move on

Baby steps first – MVT (minimum value test)

Stay focused

Find your rhythm

Tension vs. peace

Minimize the red time

Listen to your tests

Know your domain

Refactor from green – Don’t start refactoring with failing tests

Behavior, not implementation

Let your TDD’ing be exploration… discovery

Be tenacious

Don’t write code… create software

Dan McClain – Supercharging ActiveRecord with PostgreSQL

Excellent talk about Rails 4 support using advanced data types in PostgreSQL. I took a lot of notes, but I would recommend doing some research on your own if you are really interested in this topic. There was a ton of information, but Dan gave a great intro to the topic that even I could understand.

Justin Campbell – Hacking your Home with Ruby

Justin had one of the “coolest” presentations. He talked about using the Raspberry Pi and being able to directly interact with it via Ruby. There are nearly endless possibilities of what could be done with this. Justin demonstrated using the Raspberry Pi with a USB wi-fi adapter and a relays to be able to control any electrical component wirelessly from your phone or any web browser. This includes lights, garage doors, sprinkler equipment (via solenoid valve), etc. He wrote a library for interacting with the Raspberry Pi called whipped cream. I’ll definitely be checking this out later when I have time.

There were many other great talks, and I’ll be including links to the presentations and videos as they get posted.

There seemed to be a recurring theme for many of the presentations: don’t write code, create software. Don’t focus on the coding, materialize an idea. I know that applies to developers of all shapes and sizes, but I think it rings very true for learning to code also. The best way I have found to learn coding is to build something. It is also much more effective if you are building something you care about. The purpose of coding is to solve a problem, and without a problem it becomes pointless. If you are learning to code, find a problem that is interesting to you and create something that solves it. Maybe you want to make a Fibonacci calculator (which Dan Sharp has posted his code for online in his stock price predictor repo), maybe you want to build a site that matches people with similar hairstyles… it doesn’t matter. Tools like Codecademy and CodeSchool are great to get started, but remove those training wheels as soon as you can and you’ll be riding that bike faster than you thought (after a few scraped knees and maybe a concussion).

SO GET OUT THERE, GET EXCITED, AND BUILD SOMETHING!

Another thing I wanted to mention was one of the main themes of Sandi Metz’s opening keynote speech. You will die. People around you that you love and care for will die. You will grow old and your body will start to fail you. Don’t spend your entire life living behind a computer screen. It’s so easy to get stuck living in your own little bubble and not realize there’s an entire world going on around you. Get out and exercise, spend time with your family, relax once in a while… live your life.

Last, a big thanks to the organizers, the sponsors, the volunteers, and all the attendees that made this weekend so special. I can’t wait to see you next year!

Thanks for reading,

Brent

[brentraines]

ProjectEuler and RubyMonk

Some of the pre-work for Startup Institute was doing a few problems from projecteuler.net. These problems are a great way to get some practice in solving mathematical problems and writing algorithms. My plan is to solve as many as I can (there are 439 as of this post), then go back and look at how I can refactor and make my code more efficient. I’ve done the first ten so far and was having problems with number 11, so I took a little detour to learn more about multi-dimensional arrays and grids.

I’ve been doing the lessons on RubyMonk for a few days and really like them. I’m just getting into some of the more advanced data structures like stacks and queues. I think I will take a break from RubyMonk and let these new concepts sink in and head back over to ProjectEuler.

If you are new to Ruby, I found Codecademy good for learning some of the syntax. Codeschool also just added some basic ruby courses that are good. Once you get a little comfortable with it, just play around with IRB in terminal a lot and read through the Ruby documentation. That’s been the best way for me to understand how things actually work.

My solutions to the first ten problems on ProjectEuler are posted on my Github under DevPreWork01, and there is a link to my Github at the bottom of the page.

Thanks for reading,

Brent

[brentraines]

Taste of Eship with Rich Paret

I was fortunate enough to listen to Rich Paret and get to ask some questions tonight at Krashpad Central. He was a great guy, and obviously very excited and very passionate about what he does. He was also very passionate about sharing his knowledge and experience with us, which got me pumped up. I love the interactions I’ve had with people in this startup culture here in Boston. Someone who already has next to zero free time will find the time for a person(s) they don’t even know. This hasn’t been an isolated incident. I have experienced multiple examples in this community of people who just love helping other people, and it almost seems contagious. There is something thrilling about talking with someone and being able to help them with whatever they are going through, because you have experienced those same issues before… hearing them talk about the same fears, the same worries, and probably making the same mistakes as you once made. On the other side, it is equally exciting to speak with someone who has been in your shoes and been there, done that.

Rich shared a lot of knowledge about scaling, his expertise, albeit a very broad term. He referenced scaling problems to finding whatever it is that bottlenecks your business and solving that issue. If your website can’t handle an increased volume of users, improve your website performance. If you have an incoming stream of data that can spike above the means of your data collection software, upgrade that software (an actual problem for Crashlytics with multiple app launches in a single day). There is also a scale cube, which has three parts: an x, y, and z-axis. More info here: scale cube.

He discussed choosing programming languages, and using the right tool for the job. Ruby on Rails works great for an early startup for rapid prototyping and making ground early on, but may not be efficient for scaling at a rapid pace. As a junior developer, he recommended picking up a higher level language like Ruby or Python, and then learning a functional language such as Scala or Clojure (he even mentioned Crashlytics recently started using Go for certain tasks that need extremely fast performance). If you are new to programming and are debating what language to learn, stop debating and start learning! I spent way too much time worrying if I was picking the “right” language. Anything you learn will make you a better programmer.

He also talked about being very fortunate with 3 exits in 2 years, but also “pancaking for 13 years” before that. I was very interested in his personal motivations, and what drove him to continuously “pancake” for 13 years until he finally got the payoff. His answer was about process in the corporate world. After a two hour meeting where everyone discussed actions that needed to be taken and could be taken, no actions were actually taken. In the startup world, you find out what you think needs to be done, and you do it. If that doesn’t work, you try something else. At a startup, even the smallest employee can have an immediate and profound impact on the company. Coming from the extremely bureaucratic and process heavy field of nuclear power, I have a deep sympathy for that feeling (helplessness and frustration).

I am extremely pumped after another Taste of Eship event. I’m even more pumped to be starting this blog and documenting what will probably be some of the most exciting, memorable times of my life. I have no clue what the future holds and I love it! 

Thanks for reading,

Brent

[brentraines]

This is my biggest project so far. It's a site for my upcoming wedding. You can sign in as [email protected], password: guest01.

[brentraines]

This was the first Rails app I built on my own. It uses the Twitter API to gather information and sort topics that your followers are tweeting about. It was fun to build, but is fairly simple and could have a more intuitive UI.

[brentraines]

This was my first rails app, built following the Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl. There is a link to the tutorial under my Links.

[brentraines]

Reactor Operator to Web Developer

For my first post, I’ve decided to provide a little background on myself, and talk about the purpose of the blog.

  I joined the Navy at 18 and spent 6 years on submarines as a Reactor Operator. After I got out in 2011, I swore off working in nuclear power. Several months later, I was working at a nuclear plant in Seabrook, NH. I realized that wasn’t my future, and I needed to start doing something (anything) that would get me closer to my goal of starting my own business and farther from nuclear power. I came up with an idea and decided I needed to build a website for this service. I had a very ambitious, but unrealistic, goal of learning to code and building a complete site in a matter of 3 months. It took me a couple of days to realize the high improbability of accomplishing this feat. I eventually learned not to set such narrow minded goals, and just focused on learning more every day. I continued with this mindset for about 6 months, and then started thinking about how I could take it further.

I started doing some research and discovered Startup Institute, and I became extremely curious as to what they were all about. I signed up for a part time program through them called Ramp Up, and was invited to one of their Important People Honest Conversations meet-ups. This was my first introduction to the startup culture, and I was instantly addicted! There were two people I met as a result of these meet-ups that significantly changed my life, and that I owe a great deal to (whether they will admit it or not). They saw how passionate I was and encouraged me to make the leap. There were so many doubts and fears, leaving a secure job with good pay for no job, no pay with an undefined future. The second best decision of my life was quitting my miserable, dead end job and diving into the waters of the unknown head first (the best decision was asking my beautiful fiancée to marry me). I have never felt such a weight lifted, and I can’t wait to find out where this takes me. I am now living in Boston at Krashpad, and will be starting class full time at Startup Institute for Web-Development on Oct. 21.

This blog is intended for other junior developers, people who want to learn to code, or people that are on the edge of that cliff and need a little nudge. I will be writing about my personal triumphs and struggles learning to code. I may include specific tutorials for something I found especially challenging. There will also be a list of sites I found especially useful. I will be posting all of my work for perusal and critique. I will accept any questions and answer to the best of my abilities. I hope that you enjoy this blog and that it will be helpful in some way. I will try to update every day with at least a short post.

Thanks for reading,

Brent