My Five Day Plan

I squeezed in a bit of coding today and completed a review of Exercise 15 and nearly all of Exercise 16 (including the extra credit). I'm off tomorrow, but so is the rest of the family, so I'll be able to get in an hour or so.

If I really push it, I can finish up the rest of the book sometime on Tuesday. Then I'll start pushing my code samples and exercise scripts up to GitHub. I'll start Bash from the Ada curriculum after that.

I realize that this isn't most scintillating set of blog posts, but right now it's serving it's purpose to keep me on track. I'll have something more interesting to say soon.

No Excuses

I just discovered a Ruby for Android app in the app store: Ruboto. It looks like I may have just lost my whiny "I was on the bus all day so I couldn't code" excuse. This should be interesting. Now let's see what I can do with GitHub on here!

No Code Day

:(  I spent my learning time today on the bus and waiting for buses in the rain, so I didn't so any coding today and am frankly too tired to do much tonight. I did have time to catch up a bit on my podcast queue.

The Freelancer's Show had a book club episode on "Book Yourself Solid" by Michael Port. He talked lot about networking and general business building, but he did touch on how important it is to do work that is important to you and to avoid working with clients that burn you out.

And that's a big party of why I'm putting cake poon (thank you, autocorrect) getting to sleep tonight. I'm going to do one exercise in Ruby the Hard Way, but then it's off to bed. See you tomorrow!

Day Two of My Fork of the Ada Developers Academy

I haven't actually forked it - but I will add that to my list of ideas once I jump into Git (which is coming up!)

I'm still working through Learn Ruby the Hard Way. I just finished Exercise 13. It gets very intense later in the course, so I'm trying to speed through the easy sections as quickly as I can and still understand them.  :)  Sometime next week I will push up all of my exercise scripts to GitHub (again, part of the Git portion.)  Until next time, back to the grindstone.

Procrastination Sucks

Yes, I am a recovering procrastinator. I have many excuses: I'm very busy, full-time job, kids, etc., etc., etc.

I think I may have finally found what will break me of my procrastination habit. I missed the application deadline for the Ada Developers Academy by a few hours because I was too afraid to actually start submitting the application. I read the assignment, created and even uploaded the YouTube video, everything. My fear held me back.

So.

Luckily, the ADA curriculum is open sourced on Github, so I'm following along. I'm working through Learn Ruby the Hard Way right now. I'm planning to use the overall timing structure of the ADA to keep me on track and focused and put a little fire under me. When it comes time for the real ADA students to start their internships, I'm going to take a deep breath and find something that at least resembles an internship for myself. I have no problem advocating for my kids. It's time I did it for myself, too.

So, back to work. I'm going to blog along the way. (And if I have to create an entry that says "I sucked and didn't do any learning today," I will. Just one of those that pop up on a Google search should keep me in the game.

Edited to add: my favorite little pep talk bit from Learn Ruby the Hard Way is this:

• Remember that everyone makes mistakes. Programmers are like magicians who like everyone to think they are perfect and never wrong, but it's all an act. They make mistakes all the time.

Followed closely by the descriptions of the types of people who will insist you need to use a Mac or Linux if you're going to be "real" programmer. :D

Here We Go Again

I'd like to say I'm like Madonna, and I can keep making comebacks. That would require that I hit it big in the first place. Eh, imperfect world, imperfect metaphors.

I'm back in the saddle, applying to the Ada Developers Academy. I'm a little stuck on creating a video (I'm of the older generation that created presentations on poster boards, so I'm a little out of my comfort zone.)  I need to reach way back to my drama days and come up with something awesome. I happily (but only briefly) distracted myself with submitting a pull request to fix a typo on the website. I'm not sure if that's the best way to draw attention to my application, but I would never have been bold enough to do that in the past. And my old ways of thinking and doing haven't gotten me where I want to be, so it's time to try another way.

Enough blogging in an attempt to avoid real work. Wish me luck!!

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