Tuesday, April 30, 2013

Next!

One year and four months ago, I started the Code Year course on Codecademy.  A few rage-quits and many diversions (wow, Ruby's cool) later, I'm nearly done with the course (plus several other courses on the site.)  So what's next?

The next big item on my agenda is Microsoft's Windows Azure Developer Challenge.  I'm part-way through step 1 and will co-post my progress here.  Finishing two more Udacity courses are also bubbling up through my backlog.

Finally, remember how I said Ruby's cool?  Wow.  I'm giving myself a crash course in Ruby (and then Rails) and then I'm applying for the Rails Summer of Code project.  And training in Mozilla's #teachtheweb project.

I think I've got a few projects to keep me from getting too bored.  Idle hands, after all...  ;)

-- edited to fix bad link, 4/30/13 7:30am PDT

Thursday, April 18, 2013

Open Source is Hard. Let's Go Blogging!

Wow!  I've just burned through the better part of my coding time this week trying to figure out just how to jump in and (attempt to) contribute to the Wonderful World of Open Source.

I feel defeated.

I've found lots of awesome projects (this was a great starting point and I'm sure I've barely scratched the surface). But after sifting through the pages and pages on Bugzilla, et al, (and even successfully reproducing one bug) I'm still lost as to what to do next.

I'm taking a little solace in the wonderful Scott Hanselman's post on being a phony.  I trust that after all of his experience, he knows what he's talking about and that it's these moments of being in over your head that result in growth.

Back on the horse I go... wish me luck!