Git Immersion Tutorial

So I broke down and purchased Josh Kemp's "No Degree, No Problem" (more on that later) and one of the early lessons I kind of skipped over was a brief tutorial on the version control utility "Git".  As I understand it, this is simply a way to track the changes to your programs as well as collaborate and share your work through GitHub where folks can presumable browse and edit your work without destroying all past versions of it.

Git is one of those things you just have to learn about and it does make some basic sense.  The tricky part about it is that you have to work on a terminal to use it and it works best with its own Terminal (GitBash).  Does everything need its own terminal, really?  However, I was able to work through the first 12 or 13 lessons as well as establish my own SSH key with only mild frustration and a few searches of Stack Overflow.

Do I totally understand Git and how it works?  Hell no.  However, I have a broad sense of how it works and have now worked through it twice on a basic level, the first bring when I did the early portions of Hartl's tutorial.  I do plan to finish that, but I am working on a few earlier steps first because it has a bit of a reputation as a beast of a tutorial.

Are you on GitHub? I would love to see some work and check out how people use it if you are!

Total hours into Programming: 62 (3 today)
My Text game: 2 hours, 107 lines

Progress on Shaw's Learning Ruby the Hard Way: Finished Exercise 1-5

TreeHouse (228 Points, 4 Badges) 
Code Academy Points: 568
Code Academy Badges: 60

Code Academy Skills Finished: 2 (Make a Website, Ruby)

Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 

Resources Finished:
Josh Kemp's No Degree, No Problem 8/14/2015

Chris Pine's Learn to Program 8/9/2015 

Community_not_happening

One of the tips you read over and over about learning to code is that mentorship and community are really important and these things will help speed the process along if you can have conversations with people who know what they are doing.  Sadly, I live in the middle of nowhere.  The closest "meet ups" are over 2 hours away which is not practical on any regular basis.  That said I have decided to do a couple things that are pretty out of character for me:

(1) Start commenting on blogs and asking questions on Stack Overflow and being willing to search for answers in the wider community.  If I can't meet people locally, I will at least try to develop a stronger web community.

(2) Since I work at a college, I have reached out to the computer science professor (it's a small college) and he has agreed to let me sit in on this semester's Computer Programming I course.  I am sure it will be a little bit weird to be sitting on the other side of the classroom with some of my former students, but I think it will be worth it in the long run!

Community and networking has never come easy to me.  I have never enjoyed being the type of person who shamelessly hustles everyone at a conference or who is always introducing myself like a slippery salesman.  However, as I have grown older I have realized that you must make connections in the world if you hope to learn anything new or go anywhere.  Therefore, I will suppress my shy nature and put myself out there!

Are you learning coding yourself?  Taking a course?  Interested in my struggles?  Feel free to drop a comment or email me at dalrymp6@gmail.com.

Total hours into Programming: 41 (0 yet today)
Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 
Code Academy Points: 451
Code Academy Badges: 50
Code Academy Skills Finished: 2 (Make a Website, Ruby)

Toy_app Done!

I finished chapter 2 of Hartl's book which is a great feeling!  Everything worked and I even had the chance to correct a few mistakes.  I also learned from a few different Stack Overflow questions and am really beginning to feel like I could perhaps do this unguided one day.  Whereas I was feeling pretty defeated a couple days ago, making slow and steady progress through the Ruby on Rails tutorial book has been rewarding.

That said, chapter 3 is really where it begins.  The earlier chapters essentially say that you will not pick much up in terms of deep understanding jut by doing them, but they do give you some momentum.  I am also getting more and more comfortable with git, bitbucket, and heroku.  I even got my app to display and work on an actual browser!

Python has gotten a little more sticky, but I have made it to around 40% through that Code Academy tutorial.  I have gotten to the dictionary portion of the tutorials and am trying to work through how to print the key with the values from two separate dictionaries in one output.

I also notices that I have made it over 40 hours on this journey so far.  Going from no knowledge at all to a decent foundation in basics in Ruby and Python as well as a solid foundation in Ruby on Rails is a pretty good start.  While I love the idea of working as a programmer, coder, or developer I am not relentlessly and desperately pushing for that at this point.  First things first, I want to be literate enough to code some of my own small programs.

Total hours into Programming: 41 (6 today)
Progress on Hartl's Tutorial Ready to start Chapter 3! 
Code Academy Points: 447
Code Academy Badges: 50
Code Academy Skills Finished: 2 (Make a Website, Ruby)

Learning How to Start Over

Last night I got on a roll in Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial.  Everything seemed to be going very smoothly (outside of Heroku issues).  I fairly quickly generated the app and the database needed for the toy_app.  Then, sadly, things went awry.  My database was supposed to include two prompts, one for username and one for email.  However, it included 4 - one for email, one for string, one for username, and another for string.  I must have mistyped or misunderstood something along the way.  I tried to overwrite the database using the --force command I discovered on Stack Overflow.  I could not get this to work.  So, finally, I learned how to delete the app, its git repository, and delete it from Heroku.  While this was not the most desired outcome, I did learn a new skill of sorts.  Now, to start again!

Total hours into Programming: 35 (5 today)
Progress on Hartl's Tutorial 2.0.0 (got the 2.2.1, but am starting this section over)
Code Academy Points: 403
Code Academy Badges: 47
Code Academy Skills Finished: 2 (Make a Website, Ruby)