Kimberly Lowe-Williams

Dear Creator of Rails –

Thank you! Last night I successfully installed and used Rails for the first time and I must say after using MAMP, MY SQL, and WordPress…. this was a breeze! It is very intuitive and has handy shortcuts… who doesn’t love shortcuts to quickly getting a site locally hosted and ready for coding. It is very exciting to watch all these pieces come together.

Next up, JS (JavaScript) which I have not touched in almost 2 years!! It’s so sad how fast time goes – in this industry if you are not coding everyday (with the exclusion of the Sabbath of course) you miss out on so much. Well NO MORE! I am in it! I am loving it and it will take a pack of wild beasts to pull me from it (coding in general).

Yes, only these wild wolves can stop me from coding… and only for a time.

While I may not be sure I am going to be a master full stack developer I am really gaining confidence that I am going to be a baby ninja at front end development.

See I am a total mom… couldn’t resist having a baby picture!

While I stated previously that front end development almost seems like a stereotypical role for a female in the tech industry, it still provides more coding time and skills that make me more independent. I can keep plugging away at the different programming languages while using those skills. I don’t mind being a baby ninja a front end developing and a junior back end developer. I could live with that. If that’s a compromise I even have to make. At this point I don’t think I do!

Well, I better get to being productive now… again, thank you Rails creators… there are some weird syntax issues we could discuss but I’ll save that for another blog… but really the ‘#’ to separate page controllers and the action?? Really?!?!

So we’ve taken a brief sabbatical from ruby coding to plunge into HTML and CSS. I completely understand this from having some frontend experience but there are always tips, trick, shortcuts, and things to learn. We are using Bootstrap and possibly even going to build using themes… I’m very interested to see how the professionals do this. There is someone in my class that has made a 20 year career as a frontend developer. I have struggled with themes in the past finding the right one that does not require me to keep hacking away at it can be a challenge and I’ve often wondered whether or not I should even bother using them. This part of the bootcamp is much more intuitive for me but I understand the value of being a full stack developer, this is what I am aiming for…

Which is why I am taking full advantage of this Memorial Day break to learn even more Ruby. I never completed my Connect Four game and am quite sad about that…. I get completely lost in the syntax. At the end of this bootcamp if I am not completely confident in back end skills I am sure I’ll have front end mastered…so there’s that!

front_v_back — Found here: http://blog.backand.com/frontend-backend-dev/

Found this image on another blog sometime ago… my biggest pet peeve is falling into stereotypes… notice that the frontend developer is a woman. It might also be noted that frontend developers are paid less and considered less technical. So that honestly might be some of my motivation! That being said, they both have their pros and cons. I’m happy to know that I will have the opportunity to be either at this point.

Tag: frontend

Rails… Oh I got this!

Sabbatical from Ruby