The Last Friday in 2013

Finally had a few days off work and I think I'm making some progress. Just finished exercise 25 on Learn Ruby the Hard Way. Will only post to the blog once a week unless I have something meaningful to share for awhile. I will still be updating my study log on Paste Bin everyday to hold myself accountable.

I am still trying to figure out how I can get three hours a day of studying in when the cray work schedules pop up. Shouldn't be a problem when it is only a 40 - 50 hour week, maybe I can record some of my notes to mp3 to listen to while I'm driving. I stumbled across Spesoft Free Text To MP3 Speaker and thought I would give that a try. Although the default voice built in Windows leaves something to be desired, I think the Ivona Text to Speech Voices might be an improvement. I will post how that works out.

Saturday

I managed to get a day off work today so can hopefully get some good study time in today!

In some of the casual reading I have been doing, I have come across people talking about problems running Rails on Windows and sometimes not knowing for sure if the problems are with their code or the installer. Since I can't afford to buy a Mac currently, I decided to setup a Linux install so that I could try things out there as well if I run into problems.

I built the Linux box using Virtualbox and Ubuntu Server 12.04 LTS 32 bit edition. For the VM I gave it 1 GB of ram and had to enable extended features Enable PAE/NX on the System/Processor settings as will as set the network adapter to bridged mode.

During installation of Ubuntu I didn't install any additional packages and chose the defaults all the way through. Once it was installed I logged into the command prompt and ran the following commands:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install lxde  #this is a lightweight desktop environment

I then did a reboot and was able to login to the graphical environment. Opened up a terminal window to finish setup.

sudo apt-get install synaptic #this is the graphical package manager

I then used synaptic package manager and installed gedit and Firefox.

I had used the package manager to install RVM before I had found out it was broken in Ubuntu. Following some instructions I found on StackOverflow I was able to clean out the leftovers from the package manager install.
sudo apt-get --purge remove ruby-rvm
sudo rm -rf /usr/share/ruby-rvm /etc/rvmrc /etc/profile.d/rvm.sh

open new terminal and verify its clean
env | grep rvm

Then I was able to install again doing this:
\curl -L https://get.rvm.io | bash -s stable --ruby --autolibs=enable --auto-dotfiles

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm
rvm requirements

rvm use ruby --default
rvm rubygems current
gem install rails #This takes awhile to run

Once I mounted the Virtualbox guest additions on the host, on the VM using the command line I navigated into the /media/VBox directory and ran:

sudo ./VBoxLinuxAdditions.run

I am far from a Linux expert but it looks like I managed to get everything installed, at least irb runs. It seems that when ever I want to run irb from the command line I have to enter:

source ~/.rvm/scripts/rvm

in the terminal first. There must be a way that I can have that automatically run when ever I open the terminal window, but will need to do some additional research first.

Friday

Only worked 12 hours yesterday so I managed to get in an hour of study last night and 45 min this morning.
Reading "Beginning Ruby: From Novice to Professional, Second Edition" on Safari Books Online.

Made it through chapter two had a brief introduction to creating classes.

Long week

Work is getting in the way of study time. On track for another 90+ hour work week with the next possible day off on Christmas. This is increasing my resolve that I must do something to change this, and studying to become a developer is becoming more important than ever.

Thursday Night

Hectic couple of days at work due to an email server melt down that we are recovering from. I should have everyone moved to a new server over the weekend. Study time will be scare until that is done.

Only did 15 minuets of study on Codecademy last night. Only did that to preserve my streak of days in a row. Getting ready to put in 90 minuets of study tonight wish me luck.

Tuesday

Ok it is Tuesday night, only made it for about two hours and 45 min of study time today. I have been trying to do an hour of study before work everyday. Will have to miss the hour of study tomorrow as I have to be in early to make phone calls to the east coast and I am on the west coast. Sometimes I wish the US was just two time zones an hour apart.

I am not making it through the Codecademy exercises as fast as I hoped. 42% complete so far and earned the 100 exercise badge today. Currently studying methods and return values.

I understand the need to use a plain text editor when starting out to fully grasp a language, but does anyone that has been doing this for awhile use an IDE for writing Ruby on Rails projects? Guess I will try to do some searches during lunch tomorrow to answer that question.

Monday

Managed to get in an hour of study before work this morning. Also have an hour so far this evening. Only 33% through the Codecademy Ruby tutorial so far. Hoping to try and get in another hour tonight if I can get my brain to wake up.

Notes for later hashes:

family = {"Homer" => "dad",
          "Marge" => "mom",
          "Lisa" => "sister"
         }

 

Sunday night

I did manage to get in 3.5 hours of study today. Actual fingers to the keyboard time.

Didn't count the time on the videos this morning since I just watched. Felt like I was in the deep end of the pool there so switched it to the Codecademy Ruby tutorial. Managed to get the 50 points earned in a day badge. That puts me around 20% through that one. Depending on how hard it gets maybe I can complete that series by Friday.

Maybe after that I can tackle Learn Ruby the Hard Way and a git tutorial before revisiting the videos again.

Today will be a challenge to get the study time in since it is a work day. I do IT for a non-profit, which typically is long hours since we don't have a lot of resources.

Watching the Michael Hartl Ruby on Rails Live Lessons on Safari Books Online. Found that to be a good deal if I scaled it back to the 5 slot book shelf it only cost me $10 dollars a month. So I have access to videos and books while I learn. To bad the Chris Pine "Learning to Program" book is not on there.

Thanks to all the new followers on twitter and your kind words of encouragement.

Start of my Ruby notes:

Naming convention is to use snake case, all lower case separated by underscores.

variables

• my_num = 25
• my_boolean = true
• my_string = "Hello World"

print "Just Print it" #prints the text in quotes to the string
puts "Here is some more stuff" #prints the text and adds a blank line

12-07-2013

This is my kick off day to start learning Ruby on Rails. This will more than likely be of no interest to anyone but myself. I plan to document some of the things I come across while learning Ruby on Rails as a reference to my future self.

I am drawing my inspiration from How a Blacksmith learned to code. Hoping I have more of a running start since I did some business app Visual Basic 6 development years ago. I really miss the feeling of knocking out code and getting something to work.

I am starting learning on a Windows 7 system. I will more than likely also do some work on Linux so that I am familiar with development on both systems. Since Windows is first using the Rails Installer from http://railsinstaller.org/en to setup the Windows system.

Decided I will start with https://bitbucket.org/ for the git setup. I choose this as I am wanting to experiment with out making things public yet. As I get more confidence and start some apps I will check out https://github.com/.

I also need to setup a dev account on https://www.heroku.com/ today.