Medium Term Goals: Contributing to an Open Source Project

Find a coding buddy.
Complete Ruby on Rails course (course 4) by mid-January, 2015.
Complete Michael Hartl: Ruby on Rails at the same time.
Observe workings of Odin Project behind the scenes.
Start contributing to Odin Project -February 2015.

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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. ...

CodeSchool vs Codecademy(or 'How socket inherits event listening methods and implements asynchronicity')

In this review I'm going to focus on the pedagogy that I see evident in some CodeSchool courses and compare them to Codecademy. By pedagogy, I mean: 'How does CodeSchool teach?' and ' Does it do a good job of teaching?'. I'm going to argue that despite high quality videos, colourful web pages, and often ssspppeeeeeakkkiiiing...rrrreeally...slowly..., CodeSchool's pedagogy is inferior to that of Codecademy. There are many fantastic resources for learning to code on the web, and CodeSchool is one of them. So far I have completed courses in Ruby, Rails, Javascript, HTML/CSS, Jquery and Git on CodeSchool. The courses have all included high quality videos and colourful, interactive exercises- as well as massive pdf files of the slides ( the files take more than a minute to load on my machine .) The question is: does the higher production value mean better educational quality? The 'Try' courses on CodeSchool(such as Try Ruby and Try jQuery) are f...

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...

Programming on the Wall

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