9.30.2014 Day 2

I'm following the road map laid out in "No Degree, No Problem" by Joshua Kemp. This guy really impressed me with his goal to become a self-taught developer in 8 months. He started out shoeing horses and now is a junior developer. Amazing!

I hit a snag in the first step of the plan which was to buy a Mac Book. So instead my wonderful wife let me steal her old laptop and replace the OS with a Linux OS. Hopefully this wont create any issues. I've never really used a Linux system before.

I was able to get Ruby, Rails, Sublime Text and Git all set up and running correctly without doing to much Goggling. Then I  spent the last two days learning the command line.

Using the command line takes me back to when I was in elementary school and we used the old Apple IIe's. Man did I love making that triangle move around the screen. It blew my mind that you could type all these simple commands and get the triangle to move any which way.

Well tomorrow I start following a pretty hard course from a developer boot camp called Epicodus to start my journey to learning web development with RoR.

I am also looking to join a couple of Ruby meetup groups. Hopefully they wont notice my inexperience right away and I can learn a lot just hanging out with some developers.

-Ryan

9-28-2014- Day 0

My hope for this blog is to help hold me accountable in my journey to learn to program.

I plan to post at least two times a week on the progress that I am making.

About Me

I am a Master Electrician with 17 years experience and live in Lakewood, CO. I have an amazing and supportive wife and two daughters who are 4 and 2 years old.

How I got to wanting to learn to code

After 17 years of being an electrician I felt that I was missing something in my career. I felt that after all that I had accomplished and learned as an electrician was coming to a dead end. After talking with my wife about this felling we decided I should take the leap and go back to school to become an electrical engineer. 

To do this I really needed to brush up on my math. I joined a site to complete some tutorials in calculus. This site also had some videos on Java programming. I have always loved computers and having the newest technology available. I decided one night to give it a shot.When I made "Hello World!" pop up I was completely hooked and haven't been able to stop thinking about programming since. 

Luckily I have a genius brother in law who has a CS degree and graciously lets me ask him all my questions. If he doesn't know he will find an answer for me as soon as possible.

My Plan

Work my way through all the lessons at Epicodus, then dig deeper into Ruby on Rails and JavaScript. I am starting to check out some meetup groups also, but am nervous being so far out of my comfort zone around people in real life.

-Ryan Smyth