My first website
2 weeks of learning to code with Code.org and One Month Rails
Week 1
I started my journey into coding via code.org and their basic logic classes. It’s fun and interactive. Made for kids, it helps prepare your mind for solving logic problems and gets you back into an educational setting with tutorials from Zuck, Bill Gates, and a collage of startup people. It’s a little slow for my liking.
At the same time I started taking Mattan Griffel’s ‘One Month Rails’ class. It’s good for getting comfortable using the terminal, Sublime Text editor, pushing to Github and Heroku, integrating gems, reading error logs, learning Ruby, and integrating Bootstrap. Ruby is a great starting language, but I can tell there is a lot of black magic happening behind the scenes that I don’t understand. I can’t complain though… this was the perfect course for where I was it. It does a great job of “getting you in the game” and Mattan is a smooth teacher. Things start getting a little slow once he introduces Pins (we’re making a Pinterest clone site), but I’m pushing through nicely.
Week 2
I’m almost done with One Month Rails (lesson 42/46) and I feel like there isn’t much more to learn. The course allows you to feel empowered to build things and push to production. However, I still lack the knowledge to glue things together on my own. Technical documentation still doesn’t make sense. Things haven’t “clicked” yet. At this point I’d say my biggest weak points are:
— reading technical documentation, so I know which lines of code solve my problem
— understanding programming syntax and the patterns between different languages; i.e. when to use — (<:;=_@ [|
— understanding the order hierarchy for different integration
— Programming vocabulary
— integrating bug-fixes once I believe I’ve found the right answers (similar problem to reading documentation)
End of Week 2
I finished OMR and my first app — Pinteresting. I feel pretty good about my app and what I’ve learned and Mattan suggests codeschool.com afterwards, which I’m gonna take a crack at. One MonthRails— highly recommended as a starter course to get you in the game. Moving on to CodeSchool.com classes next.
