Progress Report - 12/8/14

Alright, 4 days later. I haven't had any actual days off but I have actually made some decent progress from reading, doing the simple courses, and working on things during my 3-4 hours of time at home. I am taking a day off of work today to do a full 3 day study-a-thon.

Last we spoke, I had just gone through the HTML/CSS section (I hate css, but maybe it's because I suck at it...I just need to study more people's code and solutions to positioning) As of now, I have already completed the Javascript, JQuery sections and project. I have gone through a decent portion of the Ruby reading material, and some of the Rails learning.

Oh, and in case it wasn't clear...I am talking about The Odin Project from last post. I'll be skimming through the majority of the Codecademy Ruby course, since most of it is extremely trivial to me being that I understand programming already. I just want to make sure I have a basic grasp of it, and then begin the projects.

My goal is to finish up with the entire Web Dev 101 section in the next 3 days. I have a pretty good feeling I'll complete it all before then, and get going in the full on Ruby Programming course. I'll reevaluate once I get there.

Let's talk tools!

I had a chance to play around with several tools, as I am looking for the right one. First I tried out brackets which I really do like...however there are some issues with the editor that I do not like. They don't complete braces / brackets for me which is a huge problem. The live update is cool, but I suppose more fancy for front end devs than anything.

I tried out Aptana, which has some really great and robust intellisense stuff...but holy crap the whole Eclipse framework it is built off of just...meh. You know what, I think I almost flipped my desk setting it all up. I spent some time screwing with things and I do like some of it, but it overall feels a bit bloated.

Now, I downloaded Sublime 3 and I have a feeling I may fall in love. I only played with it VERY shortly but the simplicity of what it does is SO GREAT for web dev. From what I understand (and have googled briefly) I can extend it a great deal to suit my needs. That is a good news because at the CORE it is an AMAZING editor, and is actually FUN to use. Great animations, fast, pretty. Yep. I'll consider purchasing it after the evaluation period if it continues to meet my needs.

Moving on...

Well, I am really happy with everything I am learning. I can't wait to start applying for jobs. One thing I would really love to do is some pair programming. That of course, is what I am missing out on is that interaction with people during my self learning.

I believe it would be a lot of fun if there was a service that put together screen share / video chat etc. in a way that you could do remote pair programming for example. Who knows, that probably exists.

See you in a couple of days!