#ruby newbie

What other ways are there to loop in Ruby other than while and until ?

The Daily Weekly Pat

A whole week has gone by without an update on how Pat is doing. We wrapped up our last project last week and then dove into final projects this week. But if you thought that coding bootcamp would get me, I’m here to prove you wrong. Here’s a backlog of how Pat’s been doing the past week. No, he did not complete the puzzle by himself. He had a lot of help.

Week 9 Word of The Week: Practice

Last week was intentionally unstructured. We had a loose assignment which allowed each of us to personalize our work. I chose to build an app for my book club and play around with the Amazon API. It was a lot of fun and less painful that I thought it would be. I also challenged myself by choosing to deploy the finished app to Heroku without supervision from my instructor. Deploying on Heroku is easy, their documentation and marketing copy will tell you that. But inevitably, any launch is always going to be complicated with config stuff.... and that wound up taking a few good hours to resolve. The experience was frustrating and gratifying at the same time. 

I also got to spend a little more time working on the front-end side of things which was really fun. I wish I had more time for it, but there’s never enough hours in the day. I have a feeling I’ll be tinkering with the project off and on for a while. The most important part is that the major features and styles were completed before this week started so that I could devote my time to the final project.

This week has been different. We no longer have morning lectures, but somehow the hours still fly by. I still experience the same roller coaster of emotions day to day; one day I’ll feel confident (or as confident as “hey, I can do this” sounds) and the next day it’ll feel like this:

The Daily Pat

3 days behind on The Daily Pat challenge. I took pictures, but never got the change to upload them. Clockwise from bottom left:

- Friday, Iron Pints. Pat is dominating Pandemic, a new game we got for Iron Pints.

- Monday, I barely recognized him when I walked in! 

- Tuesday (today), I wanted to make sure I got a picture of him before he left for the night, but he evaporated into thin air (sad face).

Week 8 Word of the Week: Gem

Things are starting to wind down in preparation for final projects. We brainstormed/pitched final project ideas together as a campus cohort. There were some really great ideas that I’m looking forward to seeing my peers build in the upcoming weeks. And instead of introducing entirely fresh topics, we’re now moving into accessory work. We’re working with our instructor’s preferred gems for common tasks and features.

We also had an amazing speaker, Evan Light, from Optoro come in. He has more than 20 years of active development experience, so he’s seen it all in the dev world (and not just Ruby). The Iron Yard gives the speakers a lot of freedom when it comes to topics and gems have been heavy on Evan’s mind recently. We discussed considerations when choosing gems to work with and the role code review plays with gem use. He also shared his experience, and implicitly, his advice, on how to succeed as a junior dev, selecting the right workplace as a junior dev, and gem maintenance and performance considerations. He stuck me as someone who truly wants to see the next generation of web devs succeed. And while his message wasn’t anything we hadn’t heard before, his authenticity made his delivery refreshing.

This was shared by our campus director here at The Iron Yard. Typically, I wouldn’t click on links like these. As someone who used to sit on the other side of the table, I’ll admit I haven’t been listening as intently as I should about he job hunt once I graduate. I listen and I nod when I agree, but I haven’t really been reflecting on how this changes my approach once I’m done with my course.

None of the author’s insights are particularly new to me. It should be common sense. But his last example stuck with me. If you mention that you know RSpec, then you should be confident enough to walk someone through a short presentation on what it does. It’s like resume padding. What would you do if you padded your resume with a skill that you didn’t really have? You’re probably not going to get the job.