Programming on the Wall

Over the past few days I've made some satisfying progress with Ruby, specifically regarding I/O operations and interacting with APIs.  I designed a Hangman game where you can save and load games to which I'm going to add an AI that plays against a human. For the NE Coding Newbs meetup next Thursday, I'm putting together a tutorial on designing a Tic Tac Toe game in Ruby. The tutorial is aimed at beginners so I'm working on putting in as much scaffolding as possible. My Django Essentials book arrived so I'll be working on that as my second project (Odin Project being the main one).

Using this ( http://www.vikingcodeschool.com/posts/why-learning-to-code-is-so-damn-hard )  as a guide, I now realise I've entered the 'Desert of Despair' stage of this journey. Thanks to the design of the Odin Project, I jumped off the 'Cliff of Confusion' a couple of months ago. The Odin Project has students designing programs from scratch at an early stage, interleaving 'hand-holding' tutorials to teach new tools. What does the landscape look like in this desert? Dwindling level  appropriate (i.e. intermediate) tutorials. If you are creating something original, it is hard to identify where exactly to go next. How does one escape? Only by putting one foot in front of the other and sending out occasional SOS signals.  Trying to jump straight into developing a web app (beyond the basic blogger sort) proved too much at this stage. The lesson was valuable though.  I realised I need to learn more about I/O operations, databases and APIs among oth