tl;dr: Blah blah blah, want to be a ruby / RoR developer. Spent time working at Rinse, LINE, Renovate America out of college. Currently have basic knowledge of the command line, text editors, git, and html/css. Oh, and Michael Hartl is awesome.
I really didn’t consider starting a blog about this journey until I started reading about so many others (here and here to name a few). So here I am, typing away (probably incoherently). The goal for this blog is to help me track my progress as I aim to become a full stack web developer. I’m *crossing my fingers* that I will be able to look back at how far I’ve come at some point. Anyway, let’s dive into my background quickly and then I’ll do a brief update on where I am in terms of skill level.
I’ve always loved screens. Mainly mobile devices – my mind was blown when I saw the New York Times website on an iPod Touch – and I’ve followed the tech scene ever since. In college, I majored in Math and Economics along with a minor in media studies. In hindsight, maybe I should’ve studied computer science, but that’s neither here nor there at this point. Out of college, I was a customer experience intern at Rinse, got a full time biz dev / product management position with LINE, and my second full time position as a product owner / scrum master at Renovate America. I could write pages and pages about my time at these companies, but just shoot me an email if you’re interested to hear more.
So to say that I haven’t learned a ton in the past two years is a huge understatement. I’ve always come away searching for more though (e.g. tangible skill set, depth of knowledge about web development / computer programming, etc.). So after quitting my job at Renovate America, I had two goals for the next year: 1. Travel 2. Become a web developer.
I’m extremely fortunate to have parents who have also made their living in the tech industry. My dad’s journey has been programmer > dev manager > programmer and my mother’s resume includes positions that loosely go as project manager > scrum master > dev manager. To say I’m fortunate is definitely an understatement.
Enough background though, let’s dive into skill set. I started getting really serious about becoming a web developer in the middle of August. It started with a week checking out team treehouse going through their developer fundamentals and front end developer courses, but I didn’t want to pay $200 to keep going. So I switched gears (with some guidance from pops) and tried to start building a rails app. I quickly got frustrated trying to solve a rails versioning issue and still felt like I had no clue what I was doing. So in my frustration, I went backwards and searched for other tutorials. I was fortunate to stumble upon learnenough.com.
Let’s just say that Michael Hartl and his team are awesome. Instead of the hand holding route that in-browser tutorials decide to take, they put you in the tools that you’ll actually use as a developer (command line, text editor, git, html etc.). I spent about week or two going through the first four that he recommends, which I’ve linked above, and found myself actually retaining what I had learned. Unfortunately, they’re not quite done building out the tutorials (css, javascript, rails, ruby, etc.), but I’ll definitely backtrack once they’re up to go through them.
So onward I went searching again – looking to find a tutorial that picked up around the css / javascript point. I had listed the Odin Project on my to do list, and decided to jump right in. I almost skipped ahead to the css / javascript, but am entirely grateful that I decided to start at the beginning. It never hurts to go over internet / web fundamentals again.
That’s where I sit as of today. Main skill set includes: basic / intermediate command line, text editor, git, html, and css knowledge. I got my first taste of javascript today and absolutely love it. Can’t wait to do more powerful things with it. I’m not quite sure how to end it, but my following posts definitely won’t be this long. I’ll check back in tomorrow. Oh, and if for any reason you want to check out my to do list, click here.