#thestarterleague

[startersauce]

Holy Crap

(that's me, if you couldn't tell...)

Officially Week 2; Class 4 of Web Development and all I can say is "Holy Crap!" butttttttt not in an awesome way. OK fine, some wonderful AH-HA moments:

- I am FINALLY understanding how to write HTML/CSS - Using Bootstrap is a god send when laying out pages initially - Having a good understanding and foundation of HTML/CSS is really exciting - Error states aren't scary and you should always read them!

Last week we started to learn about programming in Ruby, which is what we are going to mainly use to build out apps in class. Actually, we are going to use Rails, but learning Ruby is essential. I will say right now, I don't think I have tried so hard to understand something in a very long time. Ruby is like learning math all over again, but instead of numbers you are using words, and you have to use them logically. Makes sense? Right. My eyes are constantly glued to Sublime and Terminal, so much so, that I am having programming dreams. 

I can easily admit that I still don't get it, granted it's been two days, but I am happy that I don't feel alone. This stuff is hard to grasp, but is so powerful. The hardest part is to think simply and logically. Computers are not smart, they just do everything we tell them to do; as stated in our Learn to Program book by Chris Pine. Being the visual person I am, it is hard to boil things down into words, so this is a double challenge. Me no good speak.

On a good note, we have been paired up with mentors who went through The Starter School program (a 12 month program to build and develop apps/business/startup). Meeting with my mentor was a bit of a shining light today. After yesterday's class, I felt so confused and lost and wondering if I will ever even understand programming and if this whole class was a total waste (woof!). Erinn Barr, my wonderful mentor, made me feel a lot better about my state of confusion. Everyone gets lost and confused and what is most important is to ask questions and just keep doing the exercises, over and over again. 

I have risked a lot to take this summer to solely focus on learning to program and code, and this is the first leg of a marathon, and that is usually the hardest. I am only really competing against myself and I just need to push through. Luckily, I don't feel stupid! 

Next steps: I gotta think of some SIMPLE web apps. Everything I have thought of has been super complicated and can no way be completed in two months. I would rather come out with a simple product and develop it all the way through, then some pie in the sky idea that has really gone now where. So stay tuned for that everyone! 

App idea #1 Hungry Cat: Feed your cat digitally...

JUST KITTEN....

UGH....

I'VE HAD TOO MUCH COFFEE.

[willpiers]

Colder than Boulder

Hello interwebs. I am literally amazed at how quickly a week passes here. It's astonishing how fast a week can elapse without me having time to write here. Of course, you never have time for anything; you make time for the things you like to do. Deep shit, I know This past week brought a lot of cool discussions among classmates and instructors, and we have now (nearly) completed our first CRUD app. I'm really starting to feel like I can go off on my own and read the rails guides or the ruby/rails documentations. It's a great feeling, but I'm really excited to be able to build things. Right now I feel like the main things holding us from being able to make incredibly powerful apps are, 1) validating the information that we take in; i.e. making all of the information in our databases uniform, and 2) making associations between different resources in our applications (for facebook, this means linking a user to their posts, or a post to its comments and likes). We're so close and I really think that we'll be building great things soon. I have plans to make a blog from the ground up soon. I had some great times with the TSL guys (not many gals though, unfortunately) this week as well. Friday evening we went to a bar and then over to the "full stack house" for some hookah and a few drinks. The full stack house is where Arvin, Raghu, and a few other Starter League alumni /students/instructors live; it's a really nice place and the guys are very inviting and cool. Today, about 15 of us TSL students made our way over to chase auditorium for an event put on by Technori called the Pitch, or something similar. I had heard some great things, but I really was a little underwhelmed. There were some decent ideas, and one or two relatively charismatic presenters, but that's it. Three of the five presenters were really poor speakers and didn't have clarity in their pitches. Anyway, it was a good time and it was really cool to see Harper Reed, the CTO for Obama's recent campaign; he was an awesome speaker and had some good things to say. We've been doing a lot of brainstorming recently for demo day projects, and I think we're getting pretty close to actually starting on one. My buddies (Ty and Ankur) and I are pretty excited about it and I think if we find some designers interested in joining us we'll be on our way. In completely unrelated news, I think I'll be going to the Michigan vs. Indiana basketball game this saturday. That's #1 and #3 nationally... And the Super Bowl is on sunday. Happy surfing, you interwebbers.