25 Days of Study-Assessment

A quick assessment of what I've learned in the last 25 days:

-Basic HTML, CSS & Javascript (I can build a simple webpage and make it do things).
-Basic Computer Science (I have a grasp of the fundamentals of computing).
-Version Control (I can create repositories, push files to github, merge, pull, etc.)
-Basic Java (I can create basic classes to solve problems).
-Basic R (I can import data and perform various analyses on it).

The list doesn't look that impressive and includes a fair number of 'basics'. However, I have learned a lot and more importantly, I am making progress. Most importantly I feel confident about my abilities-I am confident that I will make a good programmer.

So far, I haven't been keeping strict records of my time. I've estimated that I spend at least 7 hours a day of solid learning and doing (which makes it about 175 hours so far).

One hesitation I have about the Web Development curriculum I'm following concerns the emphasis on Ruby. So far, I haven't seen a single job requiring Ruby in the NorthEast-although there have been plenty asking for Java and C#.

Comments

Einstein's Logic Puzzle (SPOILER ALERT!)

On Monday I began working through a Discrete Math textbook in preparation for some courses I'll be taking in January. There was a beautiful logic problem in Chapter 1, apparently created by Einstein. This is one version of it: Five men with different nationalities and with different jobs live in con secutive houses on a street. These houses are painted dif ferent colors. The men have different pets and have dif ferent favorite drinks. Determine who owns a zebra and whose favorite drink is mineral water (which is one of the favorite drinks) given these clues: The Englishman lives in the red house. The Spaniard owns a dog. The Japanese man is a painter. The Italian drinks tea. The Norwegian lives in the first house on the left. The green house is immediately to the right of the white one. The photogra pher breeds snails. The diplomat lives in the yellow house. ...

Job as Entry Level Developer

After 4 months of work, sometimes focused, sometimes not, I accepted a job as an Entry Level Ruby on Rails Developer yesterday. This is after starting with zero knowledge on November 1, last year. Beyond knowing a little about coding (but getting the definitions of REST and AJAX wrong), what were the reasons for the job offer? I think it was the meetup group I started in January that made me stand out from the rest. The motivation for the meetup group was to help me become a better coder and to indulge my teacher instincts. After some initial meetings at the library and my home, an IT hub in town offered to host us. This meant extra advertising and prestige for the group. After announcing the meetup group at an Agile meetup group for developers, I got some volunteers to give talks. The first volunteer offered a talk on Ruby. As I was comfortable with Ruby I prepared a coding tutorial . After the tutorial, which was attended by some beginners and some a...

Week 5-Progress

Going into week 5 I feel I am making great progress. Yesterday I completed and submitted my Javascript Etch-a-Sketch project for Web Development 101. It's not perfect, but I added a couple of extra features (such as colour choice)-one improvement I could make is to change the colour choice to a radio button format and allow colour change without erasing the image. In the end, the project only took a few hours, but that was after going through HeadFirst books on HTML/CSS, JavaScript and jQuery. For some reason, my brain was stuck in HTML mode and I couldn't see how to create the webpage using only Javascript. Once I remembered the jQuery method of creating HTML elements, it was easy. I spent some time trying to figure out how to increase colour intensity with each mouseover event. The pseudocode is easy, but I can't get the Javascript syntax right-I will go back to it when my Javascript has improved. I spent the last day completing the Codecademy Ruby course-mo...

Programming on the Wall

Search This Blog