Resume, LinkedIn, Portfolio and Updates from this Week

Past few days I have been all over rubymonk.org, Lynda.com, guides.rubyonrails.org, Rails 4 Way (3rd edition) and some treehouse videos. I also have a portfolio page up here, updated resume, and linkedin ready to go.

I never considered myself to have attention deficit disorder until I began to learn to code, not because I constantly struggle with looking at my phone or scrolling my FB feed, but because of the sheer amount of things I want to learn it's hard to decide where to focus my attention. I have decided I am going to finish the month of January out strong and begin seriously looking for work in February. In the mean time I am continuing to practice ruby, study rails, read everything I can, and see if I can find some freelance or open source projects that I can contribute to.

White Board | Check List | Recent Goals

Here a summary of the past few days:

Ruby Monk-- Finished ruby primer and am 2 1/2 chapter into Ruby Primer Ascent. I have found this site very helpful with brushing up on things I have forgotten and also teaching me a lot of new things about the way Ruby works. New things I have learned include: converting implicit blocks to explicit, how a class instance variable can be beneficial, the difference between puts and p, and how to use the splat method.

lynda-- finished RSpec course and have a good grasp on how the framework works and why it is so important. Learned how to write model specs (usually the most important specs), helpers, controllers with the HTTP requests, and views.

RubyonRails Guides and Rails 4 Way-- I have spent a few hours today reading over how routes work and was amazed at how it really cleared up a lot for me. Even though I have been feeling good about rails this was super helpful to be reminded about HTTP and route names and how 'resources :name' works.

Tree House-- signed up for a trial (I know, getting spread thin) but am really interested on their take on how ActiveRecord works. I am currently finishing up their Database Foundations tutorial working with sqlite and Work Bench.

When I first decided to learn to code I was attracted by the lucrative salaries and job security. That part of the industry seems less important to me the more I learn. In the past five months I have developed a different way of interpreting things and that is really rewarding. It's amazing because I have been putting in long hours (10-12 hours a day the past 8 days) and am genuinely enjoying the process. My focus is on being a great programmer and I have never felt better.

-John