New Home

I've moved. =)
to
jterrellallen.com

Rails Time

Spent the better part of the last week ramping up on CSS and HTML via Treehouse.

The Deep Dives for HTML and Building a Website are complete. I'll finish up CSS Foundations this week sometime.

I then moved on to Michael Hartl's  Rail's tutorial where I'm slugging along in section 7.4. Everything was going smoothly up until that point.

The result should be a failed sign up attempt that shows error messages and test isn't passing...

I get the following errors...

Looks like I placed the 'shared' folder inside 'users' when it should have been directly under 'views. Can't believe it... so simply.  Spent two hours last night trying to get this to work and it took me less than three minutes to figure it out while creating this blog post.

Left = After               |        Right = Before

Yeah! It works.

I'm concerned that I'm not retaining the info, but repetition is the key to mastery so that's what I'll do.

LAST WEEK: 46.32 hours | TOTAL: 159 hours

The Pragmatic Approach to Ruby

Ruby is becoming a friend, slowly but surely we'll become BFFs. Many challenges, successes and Aha! moments.

Flow Controls

Struggled with flow controls in Chris Pine's Learn to Program. Come to find out I was reading the lines wrong and confused myself.  Of course I found this out when I reached out to a friend an hour and some change later. Pssh.

I was over on Stack Overflow and someone mentioned Rubber Ducking. It's where you place a rubber duck on your desk and tell it your deepest/darkest secrets challenges.

By talking to the ducky it helps you realize where you went wrong. So I've been talking to my little buddy here and yes, it does help.

Arrays and Iterators

Spent way too long trying to figure out the 'A few things to try' section in Pine's book. I pushed through with the lesson and made comments on the PDF as I went and bookmarked things to review.

Pragmatic Ruby Programming Video Course

Started Pragmatic Ruby Programming on October 11th. Was introduced to the Ruby ri Tool and wow, big help.

It includes 25 videos, workbook and lots of other goodies. In total, the videos are five hours but I spent nine hours on the first couple of lessons working through the tasks and the bonus tasks, slow and steady. I'm almost complete with the course though a few things have tripped me up.

...freaking error messages during testing.

Spent over three hours trying to find out how to get Rspec to work in Sublime, gave up and tried it via the command line---more error messages. I figured out the first issue... I forgot the 'do' on line 11. So simple.

So after that was solved I moved on and more errors popped up and I made sure all my 'dos' were there. Still trying to figure out what's happening.

I have to say the the visuals are a big help and the workbook is a plus along with the deeper dive reading material, Programming Ruby 1.9 & 2.0 by Dave Thomas.

New to me (Discoveries):

Divvy - workspace window manager.
Octopress - blogging framework.
Contributed to Daniel Kehoe's book kickstarter, Learn Ruby on Rails.

THIS WEEK: 48.52 hours | TOTAL: 112.68 hours

More Pinteresting - One Month Rails

During the month of September I refocused on my *JOB*.  After getting my writing affairs in order I'm back on the horse.

I knocked a TV pilot script along with 10 additional episodes and completed my first short film screenplay. I'm entering it into the Bluecat competition. It offers one of the largest cash prizes in the whole wide world... $10,000. So, yeah... big incentive.

I picked up No Degree, No Problem by Josh Kemp. If you're interested in becoming a developer check out his story. It's inspiring.

"After 827 hours of studying/learning I landed a sweet gig as a Partner Integration Specialist at ZipList in Northern Va." - Kemp's blog.

After finishing Josh's book I decided to jump back in and refresh. Mattan Griffel created an awesome video series, One Month Rails. He updated the videos for Ruby 2 and Rails 4. If you've taken the course before check it out again. I'll finish up the course tomorrow. Six videos to go.

TODAY: 06:37     TOTAL: 63:49

August Numbers

Arrived home last night after a week long trip to the Big Apple. During the trip I had little time to devote to Ruby but I managed to get a little in during the long train rides from Long Island into the city.

Breakdown for the past few weeks:

Aug 12 - 17 2013 = 5 hours 40 minutes

Aug 18 - 24 2013 = 16 hours 48 minutes

Aug 24 - 31 2013 = 2 hours

Total AUG 2013 study time: 57 hours 12 minutes.

I'm still working my way through Zed Shaw's book. Should finish it up no later than tomorrow. Good times.

Making things look pretty

This week was geared towards design. I purchased a web course and quickly jumped in with both feet. Coupled with classes on Team Treehouse I spent 38 hours in Fireworks and learning HTML & CSS... hours well spent. I'm trying to get as many things done before my week long trip to New York next week.

Here's a screenshot of the site I'm working on.

Safe weekend, y'all.

Learn Ruby The Hard Way

Sunday was a challenge. Finished two more chapters in Learning to Program, a few HTML and CSS basics on Team Treehouse. I also cracked open Learn Ruby The Hard Way for the first time and made it to Ex 4. I will say I finished stronger than I started. Things weren't 'clicking' for me early on, but after a long walk and some fresh air it started to become a little clearer.

Here's the breakdown of my hours. 7 hours total for Sunday.

Learn to Program

Decided to crack open Chris Pine's Learn to Program. I made it all the way to Chapter 6 - More About Methods stopping at 6.2 for the night.

I'm pretty stoked at my progress so far. Loving the coding challenges at the end of the sections. 

The task: Make a program that asks for the first, middle and last names individually and then add the lengths together.

This is what I came up with...

And here's the result...

I started on this big adventure Tuesday evening on August 6th ready for a challenge and I'm getting one... that's for sure. 

Week 1 Study Hours:

Tuesday: 5:00

Wednesday: 7:33

Thursday: 4:36

Friday: 7:29

Saturday: 4:55

= 29 hours 36 minutes

Ruby for Beginners V2

Started the Friday on Team Treehouse with Website Basics and Aesthetic Foundations. I moved on to correct something on my One Month Rails app then back to Tree House for HTML Basics and Ruby Rapids. I'm on the fence with Tree House... the quizzes at the end seem pointless.

After a little research on Reddit I came across this post which introduced me to Ruby for Beginners V2 by LearnStreet and I'm totally digging it. I was up until the wee hours of the morning working my way through the lessons and got stuck on Lesson 5: Method Definition - 13: Method withdraw.

13: Method withdraw We know now how to access the instance variable, but how do we change the value? This is where variable assignment comes in. Can you now implement the withdraw! method on account object, which takes one parameter amount and reduces the balance by the specified amount? After defining the method, go ahead and withdraw 100 dollars from the account and check the balance.

So that's where I'm starting today. Hopefully I can get over my little roadblock and complete the lesson today. Laissez les bon temps rouler, y'all.

Friday Study Hours: 7:30

The Start

August 6th. Day #1 of my Ruby on Rails adventure. I signed up for One Month Rails and completed five hours of training that night. Even though most of the things discussed in the videos flew over my head I logged back in the next day and completed seven hours and thirty-three minutes.

Google was my friend. Errors popped up the screen, but I pushed through.

I finished Thursday with four hours and thirty-seven minutes of watching, typing, and banging my head against my desk. I felt accomplished. This was only the start of something fantastical.

Total hours so far: 17:10

I'm getting an early start today. I signed up for Team Treehouse. First up... the basics.