Week 1: The Beginning...

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step."
 -Chinese Proverb

The Background:

So here it is. I have recently been admitted into Dev Bootcamp which is a school that in 9 weeks teaches you the skills that you will need to land a job as a Junior Ruby on Rails software developer. I have been reading as much as I can about this program including previous DBC graduates and one thing that I wish they had more of was a step by step guide of what you can do to get started and the appropriate amount of preparation you will need in order to be ready for this experience. I am not much for novels and like concise clearly absorbable information (I blame ADD and Business School) so I am going to be putting together bullet points every week about my progress, what I have completed, and where I am going towards reaching this goal by the end of May. Considering that this is a moving target and that every iteration of DBC keeps getting more efficient, robust, and comprehensive, I am hoping to provide a framework for the Spring 2013 Cohort to build upon and hopefully provide an insight into what you will need as a baseline to succeed here. This will be the longest post that I write, but I am making up for 5 months of preparation so I guess that makes sense. From now on I will do my best to write a weekly report that summarizes every step of the process including all 9 weeks of DBC and what we have learned and accomplished each week.

A little about me to provide some context. I come from a non CS background (Business Finance) have the majority of my life experience in Real Estate and did not know how to operate a command line until August 2012. I also have terrible grammer so I apologize in advance, but whatever I lack in english I can make up in math so it's all for the best. I recently starting working for a Tech Company in the Financial District in San Francisco where I scaled a customer service department from a team of one (me) to 16 full and part time employees within 3 months. After 9 months of fielding technical problems and doing my best to compile the necessary information in order to fix them with our ROR team, I realized that I would rather be fixing these problems myself and that building the product would be a much more rewarding experience. Below is a list of the preparation material that I have completed to date. I have only been able to put in about 20 hours per week because of time constraints from a demanding work environment, so I am sure you can get through much more of this in less time given more flexibility with scheduling.

Completion List:

• Black = Previous preparation completed
• Red = Preparation completed this week

• Ruby on Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl (http://ruby.railstutorial.org/)
• X2, I like to do this as a gauge of how far I have come and intend on doing it 3X before the start of DBC)
• The first time I did it the only thought on my mind was I hope I don't break anything ;-)
• This will teach you the basics of GitHub, Git, and Heroku
• Ruby Koans (www.rubykoans.com) 
• Learn Ruby syntax in a comprehensive ruby file.
• 275 exercises
• Git Immersion (http://gitimmersion.com/)
• Provides a comprehensive overview of Git version control. This is important as there will be group projects and pairing that start at DBC and you will need this in order to track changes
• Configure .gitconfig file for shortcuts
• 53 exercises
• Project Euler (http://projecteuler.net/)
• Solve mathmatical equations with script written in Ruby that your computer has to calculate within 1 minute.
• These range from mildly difficult to mind melting mathematic/developer genius
• This is an excellent way for you focus on writing scripts that incorporate loops and iterators to solve complex mathematical equations that only a computer can solve.
• This will also improve your knowledge of Ruby Operators and Boolean Logic.
• Code Academy (www.codeacademy.com)
• Provides an elementary insight into Ruby syntax. 10 chapters with 6+ excercises each
• Not my favorite but provides the basics like methods, blocks, loops, iterators, etc..
• FREE
• Code School (www.codeschool.com)
• Much more in depth segments that involve 6 chapters and 6-8 exercises per chapter.
• Unit testing, Rspec, Ruby syntax, Git, Rails best practices, Java, HTML5 and CSS.
• Much more difficult than Code Academy, but still a confined environment with limited context.
• $25/month and $20/month after that. You should be done with most of this within 2 months so no more than $45 needs to be spent.
• Practical Object Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz (www.amazon.com)
• Looks in depth into building sustainable dynamic code.
• Teaches how to mitigate dependencies to make code more flexible and minimize cost of change in the long run.
• $32.09

Epic Fail of the week: I lobotomized my computer and had to factory reset the whole thing after downloading the developer Xcode package for Apple. Just FYI, if you are thinking about downloading this you will be incapable of creating a make file so that pretty much renders your command line completely useless. I took it to one of our Senior Ruby on Rails Developers at our company and they did not have the slightest clue on how to fix it. Moral of the story, focus on Ruby Syntax and not on tricks you can use on the command line.

For my upcoming posts over the next 20+ weeks I will follow this structure below so it will be both easy to read and predictable if you just want to skip to the preparatory material that I have completed to have something to follow:

Summary of the week:

Completion List:

Epic Fail of the week + hopeful resolution: