Sweet Child(ren) of Mine

I spent the evening after work baking brownies and coding writing mini Ruby programs of silly questions with my kids. Initially, my seven year old was rather miffed that I kept insisting that we type in responses to each multiple choice question. Once she got to see the program in action, she could see that it was fun to enter in the "wrong" answer to get a "try again" from the computer. She got to learn something about logic and I got to complete an exercise in the Ruby book!

Tomorrow I will attempt to load Linux into my old iBook. Wish me luck!

More Coding Than Blogging

The past few days have been filled with frustration. My work has left me with very little time to code. This has the double edge of leaving me too tired to be super-efficient with the bits of time I can steal and angry that my work is effectively trapping me by not allowing me to develop the skills I need to finally escape from it.

Gnome has started Round 7 of their Outreach Program for Women. When it became clear last spring that I didn't yet have the technical skills to apply, I promised myself that I would apply for the next round. Whether through Imposter Syndrome or self-awareness, I don't really feel like I have the skills now.

This insecurity kept me from clicking the button to start my application for the Ada Developers Academy, as well, though. If I had powered through the uncertainty and taken the risk, I would have seen the deadline time and could possibly be interviewing for a spot right now. I am determined to not lose another chance like that again.

So, in addition to finishing the Ruby book (I completed 12 exercises today!) and starting the rest of the ADA curriculum, I'm adding to my current Five Day Plan to install a Linux distro on my old (older than two of my children old) I Book. All of the Gnome OPW projects use Linux (an open source OS is pretty key ;) )

I know this is a lot and I'm not really sure how I'm going to do it, but I won't keep doing what I've been doing. I don't have the resources to simply quit my job (to many people count on me) but I deserve a little happiness in my job, too.

The Next Five Days

After hitting a neighborhood of speed bumps with the last two exercises, I haven't written any code over the last day. Exercise 23 in Learn Ruby the Hard Way instructs us to visit GitHub and read some Ruby code that we can find there. Obviously, I choose to delve further into the Ada Dev Academy repo :).

I dutifully kept a list of symbols, words, expressions, etc, that I didn't understand. (What does :variable mean?) I surprised myself by understanding a little more than I expected and could guess the meaning of a few things (do |t| is some kind of enumeration?) I'm sure I will find out soon. (And will search once I'm on a real computer and not just my phone!)

More realistically, I expect to finish the next 15 exercises or so by Tuesday. I have my new workflow in place: read an exercise, write the code, test it, push it up to GitHub then work on the next iteration in the extra credit work. That will give me the practice I need on git and the Ruby book.

And I'm off!

What You Give Is What You Git

Wow, that's corny.

I hit a bit of a wall when I got to Exercise 22 in Learn Ruby the Hard Way. It's a review session that the author expects will take a couple of days to complete. My first thought was "Days!? I was supposed to finish this entire book by tonight! Agggghhh"

After I got a hold of myself, I thought it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world if I had to remake my grand Five Day Plan. So I started slogging through the exercises and then I remembered why I started doing this in the first place. If I was caught off guard by how long it would take to finish the book, then the actual Ada Developer Academy students might feel the same way. I took a deep breath and raised it as an issue on GitHub. I just wish that I knew how to highlight it (or, rather, lowlight it) as an enhancement, rather than an urgent critical bug.

Since I was on GitHub, it seemed like a good time to start pushing up the code I've been generating as I work my way through all the exercises. I cheated a bit and created the repo and the README directly on the GitHub website. I jumped in and used git proper (along with a healthy dose of Google, StackOverflow and a couple of git tutorials) to push up all of my work so far. (Yeay!)

I'll finish some more soon, and perhaps even start to use git to help me track my errors. (One of the assignments for the book is to keep a list of your errors. A diff file would be "easier" and would also give me LOTS of practice on git.)

When You Need Inspiration, Turn on Ruby Rogues

(I had time yesterday to either code or blog for a half an hour. I chose to code.)

I like the Ruby Rogues podcast so much that I started regularly listening to them before I started studying Ruby. After an ill-timed phone call at home from my boss, I needed a little turnaround before I took to bed with Cracked.com and avoided the world until it was time to report to work. So, I turned on BeyondPod and brought up the latest Ruby Rogues podcast, all about company loyalty and curating your own career and, as usual, a bunch of other great gems. (Pun totally not intended.)

Ah... that's better.

I was feeling rather discouraged about my sprint through Learning Ruby the Hard Way. I underestimated the amount of time it would take me to complete it and overestimated the amount of time I would be able to steal from other parts of my life to work on it. That has left me far behind my little Five Day Plan. The good news is that I'm still at it. And, because my plan includes pushing all of my code up to GitHub, I'm being certain to complete every extra credit assignment. I read somewhere that you'll write better code if you know someone else is going to read it and that certainly seems true for me!

TTFN, I'll write more soon.

I Am Going to Code Today

I just finished writing a post entitled "I Did Not Code Today," but a "network connection" error on my phone stopped the post from publishing. As it sat there in my notifications list, it seemed liked a second chance to end today on a really good note.

So, here I am, blogging instead of coding. Time to pull out the keyboard and get to work!

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.