Not Behind, But...

I feel behind.

I'm following along with the Ada Developers Academy curriculum, but, as could be expected, I'm still on Lesson 1. I'm trying very, very hard to not beat myself up. I'm attempting a course designed to be worked intensely full time and I'm working it around 50 hour work weeks and a family. It would be a sign of a bad curriculum if I could just breeze through it in an hour or two a day. (And it's clearly not a bad one!!)

Enough whining. Back to the books. Thanks to the wondrous King County Library System, I was able to get two of the three ADA books through inter-library loan. I have three weeks to work through both of them, so I need to get back to work. Hopefully I can catch up a bit with ADA once they start JavaScript. (I also have a link for Reg Braithwait's JavaScipt Allonge that's been calling my name and I'm looking forward to that.)

Hackbright Academy retweeted one of their students yesterday:

My life is so beautifully different from what is was ~6 months ago. Feeling somewhat victorious.
— Meagan Gamache (@mgngmch) November 3, 2013

Inspiring and majorly jealousy-inducing at the same time. I can't wait to be able to say something like that. And that's why I'm up at 4am on a night that I close so that I can eke out just a tiny bit more coding and learning time. I'll get there. Like toddlers growing up multi-lingual, it's going to take me longer. But once I'm there, look out, world!

I'm Getting Somewhere

Ok, teeny, tiny baby steps, but I'm getting somewhere. :)

Here's a recent conversation I had with Bob.

$ ruby chat.rb temp_logfile.txt
Hello there, I'm Bob.
...
Hi, there. I'm Jaime.
Hello.
you are
you
Yes, Bob. I am me.
I don't understand you.

What does me mean?
Type 'skip' if you don't want to teach me that word right now.

I know this is just a tiny, tiny step forward but like an ugly baby, it's beautiful to me.

One Bit Works, Now the Rest

Okay.

I have a small (very, very, very small) working Ruby script that starts off with a small dictionary of know phrases and then learns and parrots back new phrases that the user types, as such:

Hello there, I'm Bob.

...

>> Hi, Bob. Are you a computer?

Who you callin' 'Computer', chump? This isn't the Enterprise.

>> Oh, I didn't mean to offend you.

Oh, 'oh i didnt mean to offend you' you say?

>> Yes.

Oh, 'yes' you say?

>>That's what I said.

oh i didnt mean to offend you

>> I'm a little confused.

oh, 'im a little confused' you say?

I'm still working out how to keep phrases and such separate (currently the computer will learn a phrase with each word in that phrase as a key - use one of those words again and it will parrot back the phrase in which it originally learned that word.) I'm also working on a way to make the file persist between sessions. I (kind of) know how to open and write to files in Ruby. I think I need to play around with that first. But maybe work on the phrasing first....

Oh, well, back in the fray! :D

Just a Thought

It suddenly occurred to me: my free trial of Azure may be over, but what's stopping me from using AWS for a virtual Linux box?

More to follow soon...

Weakly Post

Oh, I see what you did there...

When I have to choose between coding and blogging, I'm trying hard to choose coding. Thus, the radio silence for the past week.

I've tried to install Linux on a partition on both my laptop and the family computer but haven't had much success. From my research, I see that installing Linux on older iBooks can create all sorts of WiFi issues, so I was scared off from that route before I even tried. (Working with the busted-up keyboard and it's half-missing keys reminded me why I retired Wall-e in the first place.)

I'm going to defer applying for Gnome's Outreach project for another six months. I'm continuing my work through the Ruby the Hard Way book, though, and I'm in the beginning stages of building a little chat bot website (yes, it's been done before but not yet by me.)  I've plunked the start of it over at GitHub here and here.  I'm also looking into WGU again. I'd love feedback from people with first-hand experience!

If I've Learned Only One Thing From StackOverflow...

It's that I'm not the first one to be making these dumb mistakes. :)

Every single time that I've been stumped by some odd error message or unexpected behavior in a program and then Google it, the first (and sometime the first several) listings are all on StackOverflow. Many of the answers help (some don't) but nearly every time, I see some other purportedly skilled programmer has had the same exact problem that I'm having. Or this problem.

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!