Justin's Console Log

https://github.com/justinpinili

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Entry #019 - SF, Job Offer, Hack Reactor

If you might have noticed, I have been MIA for the past couple months. Let me recap you on what I’ve been doing since.

Moving to San Francisco

My lease ended at the end of May and I was trying to find a place to live. I’ve been living in Santa Clara, CA for the past 3 years and I wanted a new change of pace. A new change in lifestyle. So I thought to myself, “Why not the city life and move to San Francisco?” I searched on craigslist and found a place called, “House of Geeks”. It’s a space for entrepreneurs, hackers, developers, start-up owners, hardware guys, and people in the Tech Industry. The average age is 25 years old and you wouldn’t even believe the talent and atmosphere this place has. I had to get interviewed like 5 times, and got accepted. It’s in the heart of SOMA, right where I want to be. Been living in the city for a month now, and I’m loving every minute of it. Riding my bike to get around. Everything so close. Public transpIt’s hard to put into words, as the experience is intangible by describing it in words..

Job Offer

Once I moved to San Francisco, the next step was to try and find a job in the city. Since my career goal is to become a software developer, I wanted to have my next position be somewhere where I could progress into that career path. I found this one company, a SaaS platform, for a position called “Technical Consultant”. It was definitely more technical then what I do now, however it was still a Customer Support position. They gave me a pretty lucrative offer (pay increase and stock options), and it was like 3 blocks down the street from where I live! In the end, I decided to decline the offer because there was not real pathway to get into the developer side of things.

Hack Reactor

If you’ve been in the space of learning web development, there is no doubt you’ve heard of the 12 week, immersive developer bootcamp known as Hack Reactor. I actually applied last year (August of 2013) and got rejected. This was back when I wanted to get back into programming because I didn’t like where my career was headed. Moving forward, instead of giving up, I spent the last year re-learning how to program. I say re-learning because I originally studied Computer Science: Video Game Design as my undergrad at UCSC but fell off the map for about 2 years. I decided to apply again and had an interview this past Wednesday. I thought it went really well, a lot better than last year, and sure enough, I got accepted into the program! My session starts on September 8. This will definitely lead my career path for where I wanted to go, and I am looking forward for the opportunity and challenge.

It’s crazy how everything is falling in place for me. I can’t take any of this for granted. I feel so lucky and blessed to get to this point, and it’s only the beginning. I’ll be using this blog as a personal journal to document my experience in becoming a software developer and a supreme ruler of teh_interwebz.

Can’t wait.

-JP

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Entry #018 - Show Bot & Bloc Wrap Up and Final Thoughts

Show Bot

http://show-bot.herokuapp.com/

Finally, my Ruby on Rails capstone project is ready to be revealed! I've taken a great pride in putting this together and excited that it finally came to life. I've had this idea for about half a year now, and without Bloc, I would have never seen it come to production.

Have you ever wanted to remember all the live music shows you've been to, but had nowhere to store this information? Show Bot is your own personal show archive to remember and enter all live shows that you want to record. Give it a rating, review, and even upload a picture. Then, on your user profile, you'll be able to reference all the shows, you've been to, artists you've seen, and venues you've seen shows at. Compare other Users on the site and see what shows, artists, and venues you have in common!

That should give you a gist of what this web application is about. To be honest, this feels like the first prototype of my idea and I've been working with other people to nail out what exact functionality we want to incorporate in the web application. Currently, it is fee form, meaning any User can add any data they want into the application. Ideally, I would want to use an API to confirm that data is actually valid. I've taken a lot of pride and passion in to making this happen and I'm so glad that I was able to learn web development at Bloc to see my ideas actually come to life.

Bloc Wrap-Up and Final Thoughts

These past 3 months have been such a whirlwind. I'd like to thank my mentor Charles Lee, for mentoring me and giving me the basic fundamentals of programming, as well as realizing the thought process needed to be a developer. It was great to learn from an expert, and now that I have my feet under me, I'll be able to move forward with my own learning experiences.

What can I say about Bloc?

Personal Mentor. To be able to rely on an actual person and meet on a mutiple weekly basis is crucial. Not only does it motivate you to keep learning, but you'll be exposed to how an expert developer thinks and assesses programming situations. It will help you realize how you should be thinking and going about coding challenges. There is even an open hours chat room to speak to an on-demand mentor whenever you are stuck!

Curriculum. The curriculum is laid out so great. It starts out with basic programming fundamentals and checkpoint/challenges to make sure you are on the right path. Then, diving into Rails, I liked out it eased you in on certain topics and abilities.

Cusomized Learning Experience. The pace that you choose to go with Bloc was HUGELY valuable. I had previous experience with programming before Bloc, so I was able to get into the core of Rails relatively early and hammer away at some features I was curious about. This speaks for Bloc itself, and how each learning experience can be tailored to your liking. Though there is a projected course curriculum, your mentors are there to make sure that you are understanding what you are learning.

It sounds cliche but my mindset the past couple months is: It's about the journey, not the destination. Fall in love with the process.

I can't wait to see what the future has in store for me, but I'm ready for it!

-JP

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Entry #017 - Week 12 Recap

Hello everyone. I'm sorry I haven't updated my blog in the last couple of weeks. I was working hard on finishing up some of my to do's on my capstone project at Bloc. Again, in no particular order, here are some things I worked on during my last week at Bloc:

Star Rating System

Currently my application has a rating system that was using a simple drop down menu, scoring from 1 - 5. My mentor suggested that I try and spice things up by adding a star rating system. Sounds simple enough, right? Turns out, it was a lot of work just to get this done. I could have gone down the easy route, and chose a gem that had this already figured out, but I love challenging myself and it sounded like a good programming goal.

First, I had to come up with an algorithm that would satisfy all states of the star rating system. It went along the lines of this:

1. When a user hovers over an empty star, it will fill the hovered star, and the preceding stars

2. When a user leaves the empty star, it will remove the filled stars

3. When a user clicks on a star, even after leaving the hovered star, the filled in stars persist

4. When a user hovers over a different star then the chosen clicked star, fill in the star up to the hover and empty the stars after it

5. When a user leaves the star, remember where the clicked star was, and adjust the filling accordingly

What made this challenging was I need to do this in JavaScript as well as incorporate it with a radio button set part of a form for entering data in the the Rails Application. After hammering out some JavaScript methods, using bootstraps stock glyphicons, and tying it together with radio buttons, I finally got it to work!

News Feed & Infinite Scroll

Another feature I added into the application was a news feed, where you could see the latest information that was added to the application. In addition to this, I wanted to incorporate infinite scrolling as well. I personally think it makes a websites user experience much nicer, and as data grows, you don't want to load every bit of information on a single page load. I found a good tutorial here: http://christianvarga.com/simple-infinite-scroll-with-rails-and-jquery/ The tutorial was pretty straightforward, and it even used some CoffeScript as well!

Following

With popular social media, following users is a pretty common scenario, so I decided to tackle this on as well. Michael Hartl's Ruby On Rails Tutorial had a section specifically on Following: http://ruby.railstutorial.org/chapters/following-users , so I don't need to go into much detail here, however I will point out the one thing I found most interesting: Creating a Relationship model. This made things so much easier because this model alone can tell you who is following who, and vice versa. Initially, I thought Users have many Followers and Followers belong to a User, but with a Relationship model, it takes care of both scenarios, and is much more efficient!

This pretty much wraps up my 12 weeks of my mentorship at Bloc. In just a little bit, I will have a separate blog post revealing my capstone project and my final thoughts on Bloc.

Thanks,

JP

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Entry #016

Week 11 Recap

I've been about 2 weeks deep into my capstone project and there has been a lot of progress! Currently I use sprint.ly to track all the thing I want to have for my project as well as mark off things I have accomplished. In no particular order, I've come across some very interesting situations.

Different databases in development and production

I was working on preventing blank entries from happening to my form, when I came up with a solution in development. However, when I pushed to production on Heroku, I ended up having an error. I had to pull up the logs by running Heroku run logs to see what was going on. I noticed that for a date entry, it wasn't complying with a blank date. I thought this was weird, however, I was using PostGres in production and SQLite3 in development. To make less differences between the two, I installed PostGres on my computer and there, I was able to view the error. I had to come up with a separate solution all together, but this re-enforced the necessity to keep databases the same through the whole project lifecycle.

Remember Me and Forgot Password

Some additional User credentials that would have been taken care of if I used Devise would be the ability to *remember* a user as well as e-mailing a forgotten password. I was able to follow some tutorials online with how to handle this, and got this up and running. It was great to see how you can set this up with a little can-do attitude.

Typeahead

A nice feature that I pretty much overlooked before was something where as a User types into a form box, it will be pre-populated with some suggestions. This makes for an easier user experience as well as minimizing room for error. I decided to take this on to my capstone project. I needed to reference JavaScript, which I have had experience in using before, as well as jQuery and using AJAX to find the information I want to pre-populate with. In addition to this, I had to familiarize myself with Handlebars. It wasn't too complicated of a subject, and I was able to use this to make my pre-populated suggestions filled with useful and interesting data.

Got to get back to work. I'm trying to not give away any details about my project until it is fully complete! I hope this doesn't take way from this blog until the final reveal. Until then...

-JP

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Entry #015

Week 10 Recap

This week was about starting a new capstone project. I started doing a lot of things like collaborating with people that had similar interests, making wireframe models of some views, as well as thinking of the rails structure of models, relationships, and attributes.

It was tough to decide on a rails structure that not only made sense to me, but also acted in a way that made sense. I had to deal with different scenarios and possibilities of relationships of has many and belongs to. I was able to consult with some mentors a part of the Bloc program to advise some things that they suggested. Below are some key points I developed in week 10:

Migrations

Once I finally agreed on a structure, it was time to create the models, views, and corresponding controllers. At the beginning stage, I kept on changing my mind on certain attributes and relationships. This is where "rake db:migrate" and "rake db:rollback" became my best friend. I needed to edit some migration tables quite a few times, and thus reverse some of the migrations I did with the rake db:rollback feature. From there, I was able to set up thing very nicely. I implemented basic views and for the heck of it, implemented a generic bootstrap theme. I figured it was most important to get the functionality down first, before creating a nice view with the html and css placement I want.

Users and Sessions

I went on to create a user and session controller from scratch. I know that there are gems like Devise, but I figured it would be a great learning experience to create them from scratch. Luckily, RailsCast has some tutorials on exactly that, so that was really helpful. It turned out to be pretty straightforward. It also gave me a sense of what gems like Devise help set up.

Seed.db & RSpec

After setting up all the essential models and controllers, I needed to create test data and test specs. In my previous projects, I strayed away from creating a seed.db file and supporting rspec tests. In hindsight, that was a poor decision as I had to manually enter data, which took more time then creating some dummy data. This time around, I was able to nail down a great seed file and create some rspec test to make sure I was creating essential methods correctly.

Nested Forms

One of the tough challenges I had to face was nested attributes. There were some models that had a has many relationship down a chain. On top of that, I wanted to create a form for a user to submit a model's attributes, so I had to deal with nested forms. Boy, was that pretty interesting! I learned about  being able to build nested attributes and models, which would set up the form with blank entries for each of the attributes I wanted the form to display for the user to enter.

That brings me to this week. I'll be posting a lot more as time goes by. Thanks for tuning in.

-JP

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Entry #014

Week 8 & 9 Recap Sorry for the skipped week last week, but I thought it made more sense to combine the last two weeks because I wanted to put the finishing touches on my second ruby on rails web application. & Its finally done! jQuery w/ Turbolinks In my latest web application, I was trying to make some AJAX requests with some elements on the HTML page. Using jQuery, I was able to manipulate my like and unlike buttons, however the hyperlinks to post and delete didn't change but the elements on the page rendering did. After looking for some answers on the internet, I found two things that helped me solve my problem. Turbolinks and jQuery do not work well out of the box. I found a gem that makes them far more compatible with each other. In addition to this, when calling an action and recognizing an event, you have to call it on the encapsulating element that you are trying to target. For example to register a click on a button, you'll need to call jQuery on document, or even narrow it down to body, and then specify the button instead of $('.like-button'): $('body').on('click', '.like-button', function(e)... My Bookmarks http://my-bookmarks-app.herokuapp.com This web application lets you sign up vial e-mail, and lets you add URLs that you want to share via e-mail to the web application. In the subject of the e-mail, you'll use a hash tagged topic to let the URL be organized with other URLs with the same topic. There, you can like other people's URLs and save them to your profile for reference. It was a lot of fun making this application come to life. Now, I am going to create my capstone project. I am really excited to make this idea a reality as I've been thinking about it a lot. The beginning stage of the new idea is to start on user stories and think about relationships and attributes of models. Using something like sprint.ly and moqups are good resources to create user stories, tasks, and wireframe examples of your idea. I don't want to give details on my idea quite yet so I'm trying to explain all this generically as possible. One thing that I found tough to do is realizing things that are nice to have and things that need to happen. Only worrying about essentials is key first. The past weekend, I was able to meet my mentor, Charles, in person in San Francisco, which was REALLY cool! Really nice guy and it feels more natural to bounce off ideas in person. Next blog post will be me detailing the experiences of setting up my new application and organizing the structure, and dealing with new ideas and reorganizing things More to come next blog post. -JP

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Entry #012

Week 7 Recap

My new web application is nearly finished! This past week, I spent time implementing a e-mailing API and a Bootstrap theme and getting everything nice and pretty. It's great to have your web application fully functional, but unless it is clean and attractive, no one will want to use it.

My mentor found a web hook called Zaiper which integrates a mailing address and sends the e-mail to a specified URL. In order to get this working, I needed to first verify that it works in development..

There was a cool tool I found called ngrok. It will create a tunnel from the public internet (http://subdomain.ngrok.com) to a port on your local machine. I installed in on my computer and was able to verify my web application responded correctly. Now, once I verified this was working, I pushed to Heroku and changed the URL in the Zaiper web-hook from the ngrok sub-domain to the production URL. Alas, everything was implemented correctly! Onto bootstrap themes.

I found a theme to use at http://startbootstrap.com/ and made the proper adjustments to have it integrate with my rails application. When I was trying to make the provided JavaScript jQuery functions work, I needed to remember that rails 4 by default uses turbo links, so I had to use the jQuery with turbolinks gem. Once I did this, everything was working as expected. When I was pushing into production, I had to make sure I rake precompile:assets so that my javascript and css files were updated and saved. Now once I pushed into production and did a precompile:assets there, everything was working and showing up as expected.

When I finished all this, I was pretty much completed with the web application, though my mentor wanted to challenge me even more, suggesting that I try and get my like and unlike buttons working with jQuery and AJAX. I was up for the challenge and started going down that route. 

Other than implementing the jQuery and AJAX for liking and unliking bookmarks, I would say my application will be completed. Although there is always room for improvement, I believe the application I created served its purpose as another learning exercise to make sure I have the Ruby on Rails functionality down. I hope to start using more APIs and manipulating data on my next project, but I cannot get ahead of myself. One challenge at a time.

-JP

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Entry #011

Week 6 Recap

Sorry for the delay. I was out of town this weekend, and just catching up on my mentorship and projects took priority over writing my blog entry for this week. But, I'm back at it again..

After getting the wheels turning on my new web application, I ran some unexpected things. First, I was trying to find an e-mail integration with rails. The suggested coursework said that mailman was a good option. I was able to implement this in development, however, we were trying to find some way to move this over to production in heroku, and found no easy way. After some research, we decided to move on to another topic. I thought it was a good idea to take a break and do some research to see if there are other alternatives.

One thing that I started understanding a lot more was RSpec. It is a great test framework to make sure your web application and code inside of it works as expected. Integrating this with Factory Girls makes each test script cleaner and more readable. We actually found an error in one of my methods, so that already proved RSpecs usefulness!

As far as my estimation goes, 70% done was probably too high. I want to make this project a lot cleaner and functional so if I had to reasses this again, I would probably say this is at 50%. I need to find a way to make my e-mail integration work in production and also work on the HTML/CSS/Javascript portion of the website. There no use of a fully functional website if it isn't appealing to the users eye! By next week, I hope to be nearly completed. It sounds ambitious to finish the other 50% but I am up for the challenge.

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Entry #010

Woo-hoo! Double digit entry count!

Week 5 Recap

A lot has happened the past week, even when I went out of town to go snowboard in Lake Tahoe this weekend. After thinking about what happened programming-wise this past weekend, I've narrowed it down to a few significant topics: First web application is now up and starting my next project.

My Playlist

http://my-playlist-app.herokuapp.com/

I've finally put my finishing touches on my first web application. It was heavily based on Bloc's first project curriculum, but I've added some significant additions to it. Let me break down by summarizing what this web application does:

The site is organized by genres of music, then by music playlists. Users have the ability to add content by providing a relevant song via YouTube or Soundcloud. This creates a highly collaborative environment that hopes to share more music to anyone finding any interests in the listed genres and playlists.

From a programming standpoint, this is my very first Ruby on Rails application. Last Tuesday, I was ready to announce this but decided to tell a few of my close friends to sign up and try it out. Turns out, there were a lot of small bugs that I did not catch first time around. Days went by, and we found more bugs.. By Saturday, it seemed that we caught all the little nuances. All in all, it was a valuable learning experience to realize how important testing is. Some of the things I ran into were the following:

- Changing your project name affects your local git configuration. Make sure to update the repositories!

- I updated the e-mail address used by Devise but forgot to check the e-mail confirmation's listed e-mail address, which caused new users unable to sign up

- Don't let your Users post HTML code into a body of a post! It leads to confusing layout issues and leaves it open to hackers to embed harmful HTML

New Bloc Project

Bloc's second phase in the curriculum is starting a new project from scratch and letting you choose from a list of possible projects, what you want to work on. I decided to choose one that sounded most interesting. The application I chose was having a web application integrate with e-mailing services to accept incoming e-mails and using the data in the e-mail to display on the web application. 

It was great starting from scratch again. I got to see how much I learned about the MVC framework and realizing how things were connected to each other. I also viewed valuable tutorials from http://railscasts.com/ to help me out with my project. Using a gem called MailMan, I was able to create a script that would accept an incoming e-mail and parse out the data I needed for the web application. I want to say that I've worked on this for about 2 or 3 days and I'm already 70% done!

A lot of the work I did was not just programming the Ruby on Rails Project, but actually planning out what capabilities you want to have. Once you figure out what your web application wants to do, then you can make programming decisions on how to set up the framework. I spent a lot of time drawing out associations between models, figuring out the controllers and methods I needed, as well as using wireframes of the views to see what needs to show up on a webpage.

I've done all of this without meeting my mentor, so I'll be interested to see what he thinks when I meet with him tomorrow. Hopefully I did everything as expected!

Well that's it for this post. Hopefully by next week, I'll be done with this application, and I'll be starting my capstone project!

-JP

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Entry #009

Week 4 Recap

I have completed week 4 and a few days into week 5. I've pretty much completed the core fundamentals on my first Ruby on Rails applications. I'm just adding some custom implementation to make it my own. Topics that I covered this past week were Rspec, Javascript, jQuery, and AJAX.

Rspec is a very helpful tool to write test and make sure that your application does everything you need it to do. It is a good way to catch things you might have missed when coding that part of your application. We even dove into using a gem called Factory Girls for RoR which helps with generating needed models to test out certain functions, keeping your rspec test files nice and clean (and only about what you are testing).

I've had previous experience with Javascript, jQuery and AJAX so this was a nice refresher. I never touched Javascript within a RoR framework, so it was very helpful to see which directories scripts should be in. In small summary, Javascript helps you interact with your application on the client side (within the browser), jQuery is a Javascript library to help manipulate things in the DOM (document object model) of a webpage, and AJAX is used to generate HTTP requests without actually doing a hard refresh on the entire website.

When I started bloc, I came in wanted to do something related with music technology, so I went ahead and looked into using the Soundcloud API - http://developers.soundcloud.com/docs I wanted to be able to have a web application that would take in a URL of a soundcloud song, and embed it in the webpage, kind of acting like a playlist for someone that wants to listen to music. I know that Soundcloud already has a capability of making a playlist, but not to where different people can add to the same playlist.

I've almost got this working, and now just needing to clean up the CSS of the site. I'm also trying to make this mobile friendly as well. I have a hunch I'll be working closely with Boostrap the next couple of days..

In my next post, I hope to have my web application completely finished so that you can see the final product!

On to week 5, where I'll be starting my Projects portion of the bloc mentorship.

-JP

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Entry #008

Week 2 & 3 Recap

At the end of week 3, I am 41% complete with the Bloc's curriculum. The nice thing about Bloc is, you can go as slow, or as fast as you want. In addition to this, you have the resources and tutorials for reference, on your time and your schedule. With the holidays and the end of 2013 happening, I was unable to update last week so this is why I've combined 2 & 3 for this post.

These past couple weeks have been really productive. I'm putting together a Reddit-style web application full of Users, Topics, Posts and even having the ability to authenticate, upload images, comment, vote, favorite and hide/show different elements. Bloc does a great job with not only providing tutorials, but helping you along the way. Mentors are there to help around the clock, so if you get stuck on a certain situation, you'll get the help you need. In my implementation, I actually decided to go into Rails 4 instead of the curriculum based Rails 3 so I made it a bit more challenging for myself. The biggest difference that I had to learn between the two is the use of strong parameters.

In Rails 3, defining what attributes of a particular model is accessible was done in the Model. In Rails 4, it is done in the controller. Every time I wanted to make a certain element editable or create-able by a User, I had to keep this in mind and update the strong parameters accordingly. This wasn't too hard to understand, and like I stated before, mentors were there to help.

One of the really cool things that I ran into was giving Users the ability to sign up for my web application with Facebook using a gem called OmniAuth. It is a hassle having to remember multiple usernames and passwords and I'm glad I was able to learn about an authentication system that used Facebook, since everyone has one nowadays.

Another awesome feature that I like is that my web application is connected to Heroku, a Cloud Application Platform, and is production ready! That means anyone that has access to the internet will be able to check out my application. For presentation purposes, I don't want to give out the URL until I have completed the web application so that you guys can see it in all its glory! :D

I don't want this blog to get into the step by step details of what Bloc is providing because you should be signing up if your curious! It is definitely a self pace, what-you-put-into-it-you'll-get-out-of-it type of program. I've dedicated all of my free time outside of working a 9-5, 5 days a week job and I can already see huge amounts of progress already.

One of the things that I can share about the curriculum is that, at the beginning, Bloc will give you everything that you need to know right away. Then, as you progress, it will provide you with less details and more of instructions of what you should be able to accomplish. Not only does this train you to develop characteristics of a real software developer, but it also provides you with the freedom and creativity to implement things the way you want.

No two people code the exact same way. I think that there is a beauty in this. I'm able to accomplish goals set out for me the way that I want to make it out. It feels very gratifying every time I rails s and test things out and this work as expected. When things break, which they do most of the time, I get to put my thinking cap on and search different places where problems may have occurred. I can try and use Stack Overflow, Google Search, and if all else fails, go to Office Hours with my mentor.

I've updated enough for now, but I'll check back in again next Monday. Currently I'm on Week 5-6 Curriculum but i'm planning on getting through all these by the end of week 4.

Thanks for reading,

JP

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Entry #007

Week 1 Recap

I've been enrolled in Bloc's Ruby on Rails programming mentorship for a week now. My mentor, Charles, has met with me 3 times and helped me along the way with the assignment. I've been able to get through a lot of the course requirements fairly quickly. According to the set schedule, I am on week 4's curriculum, being 27% completed with Bloc. 

Things that I learned about the most this past week are understanding the functionality of Models, Controller, and Views in Ruby on Rails. Models interact with the database. Controllers retrieve the data from the Models and provides it to the corresponding View. The View will format the data and decide what is displayed to the user of the application and how it is shown.

I have an advantage being familiar with Ruby on Rails, HTML, CSS, and Javascript, but this mentorship is made for people that have never touched programming before. Bloc has been able to lay down a foundation that is essential to grow as a web developer. Every time I go through the basics and fundamentals, the clearer the programming concepts get. Hopefully I can get through the majority of the material quickly so I can take on a bigger capstone project to add to my portfolio. If you'd like to see my progress you can go to the site where I am building my first application: justinpinili-bloccit.herokuapp.com

My source code can be found here: github.com/pinilijustin/bloccit

-JP

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Entry #006

Tomorrow marks the first day that I will be attending Bloc's Web Development Mentorship program. I've been programming in JavaScript, Ruby on Rails, HTML, and CSS since May, and I'm lucky enough that I have the opportunity to pursue web development with the support of my current employer. I've never been so determined and focus to accomplish something and I'm stoked. Follow me as the next 12 weeks unfold as I start exploring the possibility of becoming a web developer.

Before I started this mentorship, here is what I've accomplished on my own:

codecademy: http://www.codecademy.com/users/jro_bot/achievements

codeschool: https://www.codeschool.com/users/415769

github: https://github.com/jro-bot

www.bloc.io

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Entry #005

Wow, it has been some time since I've written something here. To catch up, I've completed all the Mini-Curriculum in the AppAcademy suggested coursework. If you want to check out the provided problems, see them here:

https://github.com/appacademy/prep-work/blob/master/mini-curriculum/README.md

In addition to this, I've also been completing codeschool's ruby curriculum. You can view my badges here:

https://www.codeschool.com/users/jrobot

It has been a rewarding feeling to see my badges and getting small methods working, but I figured I might as well dive in deeper with Ruby before applying to a developer's bootcamp since my first round did not go as planned. From here, I found this Ruby On Rails Tutorial:

http://ruby.railstutorial.org/ruby-on-rails-tutorial-book

So far I've installed Ruby On Rails and got the first_application running on my local machine. I'm excited to see what comes next. Hopefully soon i'll have some of my own source code to share.

To show a very basic concept diagram of how Ruby On Rails works, this picture was provided in the tutorial. The controller handles the requests from the web server and depending on what your application wants to do, the controller will either immediately create a view and send the HTML to the web browser, or work with a Model, who works with the database, to create the HTML and send it to the server. I'm not 100% that I explained it very well but it makes sense to me.. so far.. Until next time!

-JP

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Entry #005

Continuing from my previous post, I was able to answer the coding challenge except for one question that had me stumped. From there, I submitted my code and got a reply to answer the second coding challenge. I wanted to do this, but as always, got distracted with other ideas.

What I've been doing lately is trying to put the pieces together. Lately I've been focusing on JavaScript to deal with client side applications. I recently was trying to do some work with the SoundCloud API but could not get it working on my local machine. At this point, I went ahead and tried to see what the easiest way was to get a server up and running.. Easier said than done.. By this point, I gave up and will ask some co-workers that actually have their own servers up and running. Moving forward, I started back at some basics: HTML and CSS. I'm going to have to know how to use it if I'm really trying to do some work in web development. My plans for the week:

- Finish all HTML and CSS Tutorials on CodeSchool and CodeCademy

- Complete the Ruby exercises on Ruby Monk to prep for coding challenge 2 

I want to keep the list small so I know for sure I can accomplish my set goals. 

-JP

[pr0-gramming-blog]

Entry #004

I really want to dedicate my time 100% to learning how to code, so I decided to proceed with applying to www.AppAcademy.io It is based in San Francisco, CA and primarily focuses on Ruby. I've practiced Ruby on a basic level but I believe I have the brain of a programmer that extends to all programming languages. Right now I am prepping myself for the 2nd coding exercise. I want to make sure I've prepared correctly so I am slowly going through the suggested material. I just installed Ruby on my MacBook Pro (OS X) after some trial and error. I've completed the CodeAcademy.com course for Ruby and now just going through RubyMonk. Here goes nothing.

-JP

[pr0-gramming-blog]

Entry #003 - Continuation of Backbone.js

A colleague of mine recommended this text for me: http://addyosmani.github.io/backbone-fundamentals/ and it's really interesting. Just another source of information about Backbone.js I'm always open to learn more information about a subject, even if I just learned about it. From here, I went through the first example of creating a To Do List. It's pretty straightforward enough. I'm going to have to try and program my own version of the To Do List. I also need to touch up on my HTML and CSS. It's funny how everything overlaps. I'm up for the challenge. No time like right now to put on my thinking cap.

-JP