#onemonthrails

[surrealsantiago-blog]

I’m taking coding classes on the side, just to learn to make stuff and to help me better understand tech products for legal analysis.  Completed my first app via the One Month Rails course, a Pinterest knockoff.  Also, it's orange + white bc I bleed burnt orange.  

I have also started an Edx comp sci intro course, but I have been too busy to work on it.  Hopefully, I'll get some more free time to now that I have finished the OMR course!    

[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.