Morgan Learns to Code

My goal is to secure a job as a junior-level software developer at a NYC startup.

[morganpolotan]

Day 9: Pin Scaffolding and Learn Ruby the Hard Way

Today I added the functionality for users to create pins to my Rails app. I used a pretty straightforward $ rails generate scaffold command told Rails to skip using CSS stylesheets since I'm already using Twitter Bootstrap to style my site. 

I'm starting to get a good handle on the MVC (model-view-controller) pattern used by Rails. Here's how I understand it. 

The controller is akin to a manager. He processes information from the web browser, and figures out what to do with that information. Hence the name "controller". So let's say a viewer clicks "play" on a video. The browser sends that information to the controller, and the controller "routes" that info to the model. Think of the model as the back-end nerdy guy processing data requests. The model pulls the video from the database, and sends it back to the controller (manager). The controller then sends that information to View, which is what the user sees. Think of the View as the sales guy, who presents information to customers. Views don't know what's going on in the back-room (Model), they're just doing what the manager (Controller) tells them. Views generate the HTML, CSS and JavaScript necessary to display the requested information to the user, via the web browser.

We end up with:

Controller = Manager

Model = Back-Office Engineer

View = Sales Guy 

Or even better represented visually:

Really cool stuff.

In other news, I completed 14 exercises in Zed Shaw's Learn Ruby the Hard Way. Zed's teaching style is "old school" in the sense that he drills you on the fundamentals and believe repetition is the mother of mastery. I prefer this to CodeAcademy or RubyMonk, because those services only go over a function once before moving on. I don't know about you, but there's now way I can be exposed to concepts like string interpolation and iterating over an array before learning them.

Oh, I almost forgot - I was accepted in Full Stack Academy's Road to Code Bootcamp! It's a free 2-day immersive bootcamp on HTML/CSS. They're holding it at Regent High School on the Upper East Side. I hope it will give me a solid foundation on these front-end languages. The founders had success giving 2-day coding bootcamps at MBA programs and decided to bring their craft to NYC.

Finally, a shout out to Jeffrey Zeldman for bringing on Avi Flombaum, dean of the Flatiron School, on the Big Web Show. It was great to hear Avi talk about the genesis of Flatiron, and his thoughts on scale in education are also interesting. If you'd like to know more, listen to the podcast here. 

[morganpolotan]

Day 8: Avi Teaches Iteration, Bootcamp Applications

Yesterday I attended a talk on iteration and enumeration in Ruby, by Avi Flombaum, lead instructor at the Flatiron School. In it, Avi built every iterator and enumerator from Ruby just using the core "loop" keyword. He started with "while" and went up to "each", "collect", and finally "any?" and "all?". The way he explained the topic made something in my mind just click. All of a sudden, I knew how my code was working, not just it's function.

Avi said he would do one talk a month that's open to the public. I'm looking forward to his next one on using Playlister, ERB, Rack and Sinatra.

I spent the entire day today writing and submitting my applications to the web development tracks of the Startup Institute, App Academy, Flatiron School and General Assembly.

I'm exhausted and excited at the same time. I also can't wait to spending most of the day coding. I miss it already!

I'm halfway done with the Pinterest clone I'm building through One Month Rails, and I plan to spend most of tomorrow working on it. I hope to finish it by the end of this week. 

After I'm done I'm looking forward to delving deeper into the Ruby language with Beginning Ruby and Hackety.com. 

P.S. Check out my new About.me page!

[morganpolotan]

Day 7: Happy 4th of July & Real Coding!

I am halfway through the One Month Rails course. Last week I did the following through OMR:

created a new app with Rails

began committing my code to GitHub

became familiar with Rails controllers and partials

styled my pages with Twitter Bootstrap

added users with Devise

customized Devise with Simple Form

On Wed I coded from 5 am - 10 pm with a few hours of break time to eat lunch and dinner. I coded for ~12 hours, and it felt great. Exhausting, but great. I was so productive and learned a ton. 

Over the weekend I went to to my girlfriend's friend's house for July 4 fireworks. I didn't have the luxury of long, uninterrupted blocks of time to work on my OMR app, but I did squeeze in some Ruby practice on CodeAcademy and Hackety. 

I've found CodeAcademy's jQuery, JavaScript and Ruby tracks to be really buggy. I've started all three tracks but can't finish it due to a bug in their system. My code will generate the proper result, but the system won't let me continue. I posted my code to the Q&A and moved on to other tutorials. Annoying. 

I also started Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology course on iTunesU. I'm just going to listen to it as a podcast for right now and not do the coursework because the professor uses Java. I don't want to confuse myself by trying to learn too many back-end programming languages at once. It is helpful to see computer science concepts that are similar across languages though. Once I feel comfortable with Ruby I will go back and do the coursework to learn Java. I also plan on taking Udacity's CS101 course which uses Python. A lot of the start-ups in NYC that I'd like to work at use Python so I'd like to learn that language as well. 

Finally, I began reading Beginning Ruby, by Peter Cooper. I've been reading a sample on my Amazon Kindle while riding the subway, so I haven't been able to do the exercises yet. I'm also on my 4th episode of Ruby Rogues, and their discussion of topics like the differences between SQLite vs MySQL vs PostgreSQL vs MongoDB are finally starting to make sense!

P.S. For students taking Stanford's CS106A, Hackety offers similar "Carol the Robot" exercises using Ruby instead of Java. 

[morganpolotan]

Day 6: Uninstalling Rails Installer, Installing Everything from Source

Despite my optimism at RailsInstaller working, and my ensuing excitement to start building something with onemonthrails.com, I had to start over. 

RailsInstaller is appealing because it is a graphical one-click installer for setting up your development environment. This is nice for newbies because you don't have to trouble with that pesky $ in the Terminal. However problems start to happen when things don't go exactly as planned. It's really difficult to modify aspects of your dev environment when everything is installed in one-click. 

To start with onemonthrails.com, Mattan suggests having Ruby 1.9.3. or later and Rails 3.0.0. or later installed on your system. After using RailsInstaller and checking my versions with $ ruby -v and $ rails -v, I was still stuck with Ruby 1.8.7. and...no Rails whatsoever. I Googled around for "how to install Rails from source" to try and fix the problem, and came upon this wonderful tutorial by Moncef Belyamani. It details a step-by-step process to installing XCode, Homebrew, Git, RVM, Ruby and Rails for either Mountain Lion, Lion or Snow Leopard (I'm on the latter). And it's targeted towards beginners. 

I decided to follow his tutorial. I started by uninstalling Rails Installer (thank God the program had an uninstall icon in my Apps folder!). 

I followed Moncef's directions and by roughly 6pm EST I had everything properly installed! My Mac was "ready to brew", I had Ruby 2.0.0. and Rails 4.0.0., I had XCode working properly and had configured my username and email in Git. I was one happy camper. BIG thanks to Moncef for writing this tutorial. It's a lifesaver. 

I was so excited to have my dev environment set up that I took the rest of the evening to plunge into onemonthrails.com. I was able to sync my Git to GitHub (I'm pushing my first lines of code!) and downloaded Heroku. I created my first Rails app on my local server and pushed it to the web using Heroku...only to get a 404 error message:

Doh!

I probably spent 3-4 hours Googling around on Stack Overflow to find the solution to my problem. I checked the Heroku logs. I tried 3, 4, 5, different solutions, from modifying the Gemfile to installing Postgres to doing a database restart. Nothing worked. 

I finally realized that the probable root cause is the following error message in my Heroku logs:

ActionController::RoutingError

I ran $ rake routes and realized I didn't have any routes set up. Ultimately I decided to leave the error be and move on with onemonthrails.com to see if I will set up routes as part of the tutorial. 

Cross your fingers for me!

[morganpolotan]

Day 5: No Coding, Just Installing Software

Today I signed up for One Month Rails. I was convinced to fork over the $40 after watching Mattan Griffel's presentation How to Teach Yourself Code. He uses a method called "brute force learning" where you run through as many tutorials that teach you how to build something as you can. The idea is that you start to soak up the learning as you go. 

On his recommendation, I used Rails Installer to install Ruby, Rails, Git, RVM and other software needed to optimize your development environment. To my surprise, it actually worked!

I spent most of the day downloading and installing XCode but had to force quit the install because after several hours it still wasn't finished. I don't know if I need XCode to go through the One Month Rails course, so I'm going to hold off on re-installing until it's clear I need it. 

Today was frustrating because I didn't do any actual coding. I spent the entire day downloading software and Googling error messages. Mattan Griffel and Michael Hartl both said that setting up your development environment is a challenge in itself, and many new developers give up there. So I don't feel as bad about it. Knowing that it's a challenge helped me push through.

The day ended with a bit of joy because I used the Terminal to check if I had Ruby, Rails and Git installed...and I did! I really hope I can begin coding tomorrow...

[morganpolotan]

Day 4: JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, and Technical Frustrations

I completed several JavaScript modules in CodeAcademy before realizing two things:

1. CA is great for familiarizing myself with the syntax of a language, but horrible for learning to build something in the real world. 

2. The software development bootcamps I will be applying to are looking for familiarity with Ruby and Rails. They don't ask interview questions about HTML/CSS and they don't ask you to build a simple JavaScript app. 

Conclusion: I need to spend all my time learning to build a basic Ruby on Rails app and deploy it to the Internet. I also need to start building my GitHub portfolio.

Next Steps:

1. Start Chris Pine's Learn to Program, the One Month Rails course, and Hartl's Ruby Tutorial.

2. Push my code to GitHub, even if it sucks. 

Each of these courses starts with a tutorial on how to install Ruby, Rails, XCode, Git and other related software you'll need to build software online. This is where I started to run into technical frustrations. 

I tried using the Set Up Git tutorial to install Git. I was able to tell Git my username and password, but something went wrong when I tried to cache my password in the OS X Keychain. I tried Googling around for help but couldn't find any answers. Finally I asked my developer friend and he suggested using Homebrew to install Git. I'll give that a try tomorrow.

Kush Patel is the founder of App Academy and recommended Jumpstart Lab's Ruby tutorial for beginners. Their Environment Setup recommended I download XCode from the Apple App store. When I tried to install the app I realized that I have OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard and the most recent version of XCode can only run on OS X 10.8 Mountain Lion. So I created an account on Apple's developer portal and  am installing XCode 3.2.6. I'm not 100% sure what XCode does yet, but I'm sure I'll figure it out. 

I'm anxious to get my developer environment set up so that I can finally start learning Ruby and Rails. I have several app ideas that I'd like to try out, and I want to start documenting my progress on GitHub. This blog is great for tracking my learning, but it doesn't show that I can build anything. 

[morganpolotan]

Day 3, Part 2: Started JavaScript

I finished the HTML and CSS tracks on CodeAcademy, and started the JavaScript track.

I think JavaScript will help me prepare for Ruby more so than HTML/CSS because it is a programming language with strings, variables, and methods. I remember similar functionality in Ruby with strings, hashes and arrays.

I also realized that many CodeAcademy students have been pushing their code to GitHub. So tomorrow I will learn how to use Git and GitHub so I can start building a code portfolio. There are some cool little projects from CA that I can start with. I remember Jeffrey Baird's mantra from his blog post, "How to Get A Job As A Developer In Less Than 6 Months."

"Learn Git and get a GitHub account. Push code to GitHub EVERYDAY. There is no exception to this rule."

So look for my GitHub portfolio going forward!

[morganpolotan]

Day 3: Googled An Answer for the First Time!

I'm really excited right now because I used Google for the first time to help me find an answer for a CodeAcademy project. Below is the project I'm working on to help me learn CSS Classes and ID's. 

The prompt said I could try adding images and hyperlinks to the circles. I added an image but it was too small and didn't center. I haven't learned how to center images within a circle, but I knew enough CSS syntax to learn. So I googled "CSS center" and found this resource from W3:

I used the property margin-right: auto; and margin-left: auto; to center the image horizontally within the circle. I changed the div display from an inline-block to a table-cell and used the vertical-align: middle; property to center the image vertically. And the results:

An image of my friend Mike perfectly centered within the circle div. What a rush! I can't wait to finish the HTML/CSS track so I can move on the JavaScript and Ruby tracks. After I'm done with CodeAcademy I will start the Team Treehouse tracks, which seem more in-depth.

[morganpolotan]

Day 2: Started Learning CSS

I also went to Startup Institute NY to tour their campus. Talked with several great students and have shifted my learning strategy. Previously I have been focused on learning HTML/CSS/JavaScript. Now I'm going to focus 100% on Ruby and Rails. This will give me the best chance of getting into the top software development bootcamps. 

[morganpolotan]

Day 1: Starting with CodeAcademy

My goal: secure an entry-level job as a junior web developer at a NYC-based start-up.

The plan: learn how to code. 

I finished the first two modules on the Web Fundamentals track of CodeAcademy. They were pretty easy. I like how they have you use what you learned to build something after each module (a basic website and social networking profile, in this case). 

I've found it helpful to keep track of all the terms used in a Google Spreadsheet. I write the terms down as I go through the course, and then go back and find the definitions of those terms in W3schools.com. I find that this review helps me understand more of the why behind what I'm doing.