Another Day...

Another day, more coding.

Everyone says that blogging as a coder is very important...so I blog.

I am also taking part in lightning talks, which are talks to the other programmers going through the firehoseproject with me.  These talks revolve around programming, tools, jobs and the like.  I've done one talk on the benefits of RubyMine and another talk on Amazon Web Services.

Although I just really started working hardcore in Ruby and Ruby on Rails, I've been coding since the early 2000's. I took a number of courses at the SAS institute in Cary, North Carolina.  I learned about data mining then and have pursued that passion for the last 15 years as one off projects for companies, but many times for myself and our company just because.

Now that I've really been working with Ruby and RoR my blog will probably be more focused on those, although, there are so many things that one can blog about even with only one subject: Programming.  There are books you can read, there are tools that you can program with, there are other blogs that you should read daily, there are help and documentation sites you should see, there are people you should follow on twitter....

Anyway, one of my promises to myself is that I'm going to put something down here at least once every other day so that I can get to my goal...the beach..the Outer Banks of North Carolina, to be exact.  Till tomorrow...

Ok, so another day, more coding.

I really love coding in ruby on rails, the language is very intuitive and user-friendly and if you use the right editor, you can see, rather quickly, if you've made a mistake and missed the end of a method or class, even before you run the program.

I'm currently learning how to improve my skills with Test Driven Development.  All the things I've read on TDD say it makes it much faster to code once you get the hang of it, but right now it is really slowing me down.  It'll be interesting to see if this changes after a number of months of coding...I'll let you know.

If anyone wants to work in the ruby on rails field, there is a great team of people at Firehose Project that are some of the best instructors and mentors I have ever worked with in any field.  Marco and Ken are both incredible mentors and are available any time I've asked for help...and I've had to move things around so I've asked questions at 2 in the morning and I still get a quick, usually within 1-2 hour, response...unheard of in most businesses.

While on this journey to coding nirvana, I've learned that the best way to learn is to just keep coding and to ask a lot of questions...if you don't utilize the people around you, you are trying to reinvent the wheel without needing to do so.

Stay on track and keep coding!

Well, darn if the week doesn't fly by.  This week has been interesting.  I actually finished one of the projects that I was working on...it was fairly detailed and I am ashamed to say, but I actually threw away all the coding I had done on the site 3-4 times because I wasn't getting it exactly the way I wanted to and when I tried to do a pull request from git so that I could go back to the previous code that worked (and I didn't ask for help) I messed up my branch and kept getting errors saying that the master was three commits ahead of what I was trying to commit...not a fun error.  And to top it all off, I asked for some assistance with some stuff not realizing that the reason something didn't work in Terminal was that the computer I was using to start the code was a MacBook Air...and although they are great, they don't have the power to finish all the projects that I am doing, so I went to a MacBook Pro.....unfortunately, I was trying to go back to the first project that I had done and realized that the errors were totally my fault since I changed computers in the middle of everything....3-4 days back and forth about it and it was a hardware NOT a software error....AAARRRGGGHHH!!

Learning to code is very fun, but I have to tell you that it is not easy.  Things seem to be getting easier and what I've found is that repetition is the key...don't stop to take notes and go a day or two without coding, code every day and it will start to become like second nature to you.  I never felt I would be able to use Terminal without messing up my entire computer, but I am literally becoming an expert at it and it feels wonderful!

My kids still aren't sure that this is the thing for me.  I've never really been an individual contributor, I've always had a management position in every previous job I've had, and I tried to help all the people that worked for me move their careers ahead while I was moving mine.  I felt great doing it...unfortunately, when push came to shove, none of those people were around for me...so I decided to combine still being able to work with people (group projects, planning, etc), but be responsible to and for me and only me.  I know it's the right decision and it will get me and my family to the point we want to be in the next 5 years, but it's going to take a lot of hard work and dedication to get there..in addition to patience on my part to realize that my code is not always going to be perfect right out of the gate, that I do have a learning curve, even though I've previously coded in SAS, SQL, and done some data-mining, also in SAS(yes, went to their Cary, NC site for training, it was incredible), and that if I keep going and moving I will eventually get to where I want to be. 

Anyway....back to ruby on rails....

Wow...neglecting the blog up to this point, but I think it's important to document my successes and failures through my attempt at becoming the programmer I know I can be.

I've had 4 sessions with my mentor in the apprenticeship program that I am working through and they have definitely assisted me.  I suggest to anyone looking to get into an apprenticeship or junior programming role to make sure to have a mentor assigned to you or as part of the program.  They definitely help break down the issues that you might have and if you're willing to share your screen and work with them, you can learn so much more than just struggling through problems on your own.

Another confession is that I've been working on one project for the past 2.5 weeks and I've actually started over 3 times now, but I decided that this time, if I get stuck, I would ask for help and use the code I've pushed into git to assist me in reverting to code and apps that were exactly how I wanted them.  I need to understand that going forward with my career, I won't be able to keep starting over on a project just because I made a mistake...everyone makes mistakes, especially someone who has only been around a language for a little over a month.

I am trying to add other nuances outside of the problems that my mentor is giving me and that sometimes causes a problem because my brain is thinking about one problem and I'm supposed to be coding another.

It doesn't help right now that my daughter just returned home from 2 years in the Peace Corps in Malawi and she's taking off tomorrow on her new adventure with Change Corps...just so anyone with kids knows, if their job has "Corps" in it, they probably aren't going to make much money and you'll have to help support them..except in the Marine Corps...they still won't make much money, but they'll have other resources to assist them.

We are also dealing with our youngest child that unfortunately did not put his best foot forward in his freshman year at UofM and will be with us for the next year while he gets his grades up and figures out what he really wants to do with his life...not the engineering that he never really had an interest in...I understand not going to class for something you don't have an interest in, but tell someone before they shell out $30k for the year while you sleep away two semesters!!!

Tomorrow I will add more to my journey to Ruby enlightenment.  Until then...

Life/programming balancing

So, it's been a week since I started my apprenticeship in becoming a full-stack developer and boy what a week.  I wanted to feel like I'd just caught a Marlin in the Atlantic, instead I felt like I wasn't quite hitting on all 8 cylinders!!

If only it was easy to get through this I might actually have time to blog on a daily basis.  Unfortunately, running a household and trying to keep everything moving forward with coding for firehoseproject is more challenging than getting my MBA and running a household!

As a woman, I have this need to dive head first into any challenge given to me and coding is just the same.  After 2 days of coding, I wondered why I was unable to debug some code that my husband, who has been coding for 20 years, put in front of me.  I mean, "I am woman, hear me roar" is my motto, I can spend 4 hours training a Belgian Malinois, clean the bathrooms, Swiffer sweeper wet mop all the floors in the house, do the dishes, start the dishwasher, empty the dishwasher, launder the bathroom carpets, run the Dyson, marinate the steaks, cut the veggies for the salad, set the table, grill the steaks, prep and bake the rolls, work on my Ruby on Rails projects, participate in my mentoring video chat, participate in my office hours chat, change all the air filters in the house (after remembering that post on Pinterest about putting a scent on the filters so when air goes through them the house will get the scent...shoot, where the hell did I put that Yankee candle fragrance oil?), get dinner on the table and prep me and the house for the next day to start all over again....are there really only 24 hours in a damn day?

Needless to say, by 10pm, my brain is fried and I realize that I didn't get in any real exercise and the Oreo cookies that I had as a pick me up before my 3pm mentoring session screwed no carbs for the day, so what the hell let's eat more Oreos and throw in a popsicle or two for good measure...yep, that'll look great on the hips tomorrow! Maybe that's why I can't get rid of the two zits on my chin while my laugh lines seem to get deeper on my forehead.  WAIT....maybe they aren't laugh lines, but lines from scrunching my face up while trying to pick said zits...I'll probably never know.

Shoot, the dryer just went off, the dog just got up from his nap and I haven't finished saying everything I wanted to about my experience, I'm trying to set up an affiliate program with Amazon and I'm having trouble (I'll let you know if I can get it done here.....oh well, let's see how the rest of the day goes...until tomorrow (or whenever...)!

Let's begin!

This is my first post on the women in programming blog.  My journey to programming has been a long, hard and fun one wrapped in to one, but I would like to share not only my experience, but many of the new ideas, new technologies and everything in between.