Blogging in the New Year

01 Jan 2015

Happy new year and welcome to jimmylocoding! This will be a space for me to document my journey learning Ruby on Rails (and inevitably many other things along the way and beyond). Hopefully it will be somewhat interesting/educational for others.

My Rails journey started around January 2014, but life took over before I could get through Michael Hartl's Rails Tutorial. About two months ago, I decided to pick up where I left off--here are some of the things I've done since:

• Started going to Ruby meetups
• Started going to codeforatlanta (civic hacking) meeups/hackathons
• Did a bunch of katas on codewars.com -- I highly recommend this, it made me start to "think Ruby"
• Took this EdX.org class on SaaS -- this was super helpful, and I will blog about this more in the future
• Got really comfortable with git/github, at least the very basic common commands
• Listened to a bunch of podcasts. My favorites are Ruby Rogues and Code Newbie. Code Newbie also has an online community of friendly encouraging folks.
• Recently resolved to write a new app every week, even if it's a very simple app

This is my second week writing an app per week. Last week, I finally made my very first app outside of following tutorials. It was a bit scary at first to not have that reassuring set of instructions to fall back on.

For my first app, I chose a very simple, some may even say boring, app: a to do list! People kept telling me "Just write an app for practice," and I had planned to do this. But I couldn't think of any good ideas!

Or my ideas were too good and too ambitious, and therefore too intimidating for a first project. Then I realized it doesn't have to be a good idea! I decided that since my first few apps will suck anyway, I should just keep it simple and focus on getting them out as quickly as possible and try to learn as much as I can from them.

If you're curious, you can see the source code of my first app on github or play with it on Heroku. I learned a lot. And even though it could be a lot better, I need to move on to Week Two!

This week, I am working on a message board app, based on the RailsBridge curriculum. The curriculum is perfect because it gives me a guide to follow in terms of what to do next without giving me any of the technical hand-holding that tutorials give. So it's still challenging, but with a bit of structure thrown in.

You can see it on github here and play with it (even in its half finished state) on Heroku. I will be continually deploying it as I finish each part, and blogging about it too. So stay tuned!

Drop some knowledge!