Welcome to Newbie to Ruby

Hello!

This is a blog dedicated to my personal process of becoming a programmer.  I hope some of the stories that I write about provide an interesting view into what it’s like to go through this process, but I also hope that people can learn from all the angst and frustration that I have faced.  There have been some hair pulling moments (not always just my own) and if I had reference to a blog like this, I wonder if I could have sped up my learning process.  I hope to take you through the adventures that I have had all the way from “What’s a rails?” to getting a job as a coder.

The language that I am concentrating on is Ruby.  I also rely heavily on the rails framework.  However, in my process so far I have worked with Javascript, PHP, HTML, CSS, MongoDB, and SQL.  There is learning to be done on all levels of the code stack to become a coder, and I hope to provide my approach to tackling each of these languages and maybe even strategies for how to do it better than I did.

A little history.  I graduated with a degree in Biology from USC and was headed to either become a doctor or a neuroscience researcher – then I took a three year trip to Korea.  I spent a lot of time learning about myself and thinking hard about what I wanted to do with my life.  I was already slightly disillusioned with medicine and research, and was trying to find what my passion was.  My brother, who has been coding for a long time, recommended trying programming and even sat down with me and helped me to write my first ‘hello world’ in PHP.  As it turns out, programming is something I can do and become totally oblivious to the rest of the world.  It’s an amazing thing to feel so encompassed by something that you would rather ‘work’ on it than do anything else.  I find that this is a common phenomenon among programmers.  Many of them work on coding projects when they are at home after work.  I haven’t seen very many accounts looking for any taxes they can do in their free time.  It really is an amazing profession that is half hobby, half work.

Now that I am getting a better grip on how things work, I hope that this blog will not only provide entertainment for those that recall their own frustrations with the problems I am having, but will also provide a resource for those who are in the same position as I am, or who are just thinking about getting into the industry.  I will provide as many resources as I can that I have also used to learn to code.  I hope that newbietoruby.com can be a first stop for anyone who wants to start from not knowing anything and and progress to actually doing meaningful coding.

In the same vein, if anyone knows of a resource that I have not included in the newbietoruby.com/resources area, please let me know and I’ll put it up there.  Also, I plan to put a lot of code that I have written up here, and I’m sure that a lot of it is going to be either inefficient, dumb, just plain wrong, or all of the above.  Please let me know!  I am, as you know, a newbie.

Finally, I hope this blog will prove that it is possible to become a programmer by teaching yourself.  There is much pedagogy that is being shifted from formal education with official transcripts and certificates to apprenticeships and self-learning.  I think this is a positive trend and I want to contribute to it.  I believe I can become a programmer and that I make this career change by just learning in any way I can, formal or not, and that I can do it in a reasonable amount of time (possibly even faster than an official CS degree).  So here we go!  I hope anyone who commiserates with these stories lets me know and posts a comment and I hope anyone who has any suggestions for how to make the site better lets me know!