Boulder Ruby Meetup

On Sunday I finished HTML and CSS: Design and Build Websites by Jon Duckett which was a great book! I feel that it really helped everything to sink in and now I am becoming more comfortable with reading and writing HTML and CSS. I can look at a page and understand what's going on and why. I know that's pretty basic stuff but I felt from the very start when I set out to do this, that I would start from the basics and work my way up. I have a good start on ruby so far and rails I have gotten a great taste of as well. I think my next steps will be to finish One Month Rails and figure out how to get past the current road block with that project. After I complete that I would really like to dive into the Rails tutorial.

Tonight I'm going to the Boulder Ruby meetup right after work. It's about a 2 hour drive but well worth it. I really do feel that I learn a lot from everyone at the meetups and I'm looking forward to still going to as many as possible. Colorado Springs has a few good meetups, I attended one of the JavaScript groups and learned a lot about node. I also would like to get a better grasp of JavaScript so this morning I'm going through the JavaScript chapter in Learning Web Design by Jennifer Robbins. It's a really short chapter but holds some good information as a brief js rundown. I have a few JavaScript books on the shelf that are next on the agenda after my One Month Rails project and Rails tutorial. Maybe I will throw it in there just to mix things up a bit.

I'm still studying at least 4 hours a day which I think for now I will stick with. I think that's a good amount of time balancing between work and family. 

HTML and CSS Review

This week I have been brushing up by reading HTML and CSS: Design and build websites by Jon Duckett. I have about 150 more pages to go and feel that my HTML and CSS skills have come along way and I have retained a lot of the information I have previously studied.

I am still studying for 2 hours in the morning and 2 hours at night.

Labor Day!

So this last month has been quite hectic with my hand injury. The whole process so far just trying to get this whole thing taken care of has been such a long drawn out process. Anyways I really don't want to blog about that tonight.

I just got back from our family Labor Day trip back to Lake Tahoe. Tanya , Gemma and I went back for Gemma's 4th birthday which was on Labor Day. We spent Sunday Celebrating her birthday at Donner Lake with her cousin on the beach and had a great time and got lots of great presents. On Saturday we took a trip up to Lake Tahoe where we ate at the Fire Sign Cafe in Tahoe City and then went to the beach where we had some more fun in the water. I am now back early due to work while Tanya and Gemma stay until Saturday morning when they fly back.

I'm currently working on One Month Rails again picking up where I left off. I have been bad about posting and will start updating more. My current goal is to study 2 hours every morning before work. So far I am not doing too bad. I am a bit slower with needing to rest my hand here and there do to pain in my joints but I just do some reading up on css to fill in the time.

It's been long enough!

Well it has been a long time since my last update and it has been a crazy couple of months. I started a new job with Trans Colorado Concrete and in my first week I only worked 3 and a half days and got 40 hours in, so needless to say for the last 2 and a half months I have been working 60 hour weeks and we didn't even have internet for over a month. I know it seems like I gave up on this crazy dream but I have not at all. As they say life is what happens when you are planning life. Now I am just trying to figure a way to keep studying while we are so busy at work. I know in a few months things will slow down drastically so I will have plenty of time to study and get to the meetup groups.

The dream is still very much alive and my goal has not changed. I have been able to do some reading here and there while at work when there has been down time but usually I can only read for about 45 minutes which doesn't get me that far and dedicating a 3 hour block of time when you worked 12 hours and still need to cook dinner and be up at 4am is really hard to do unless you don't plan on spending any time with your family.

So on friday July 25 I injured myself while at work. I was washing my truck after pouring concrete at a job and had 2 chutes on with concrete still on. When I unlocked my chute it swung to the side so I put my hands up to stop it and crushed the backside of my hand in the process. So now I have been stuck on light duty working 8 hours a day and doing physical therapy twice a week. Apparently I severely bruised the bones in my hand as well as the nerves and tendons. I have lost a lot of my grip strength, have constant pain and tingling and have realized that I can't keep doing this job. I love web development and creating things and just knowing everyday I go to work at my current job I could end up hurt or even dead gives me that much more motivation to keep the dream and all my goals alive.

With that being said, I have been trying to take full advantage of only working 8 hour days to get back to studying more. I will try to be better about updating this blog as I continue my journey with web development. I hope that soon my hand will be back to how it was and I won't have any lasting damage. As of now the doctor doesn't want me driving for at least two more weeks.

I really want to thank my wonderful wife Tanya who is always there to support me and doesn't let me give up no matter what. When things get tough or when I get discouraged she is always there to kick my ass in gear and give me the much needed motivation to keep charging ahead. I also want to thank my daughter Gemma for keeping my spirits up, she is so cute and always can make me smile no matter how bad of a day I had. Lastly I want to thank all of you who are reading my blog and following my journey. It's always encouraging to see so many other people pursuing their dreams and goals and showing that it is possible as long as you stick with it and never give up.

Crazy Week

So this entire last week I have been working my butt off. I found a job driving a ready mix truck. Pretty good job just long hours so studying has been hard. Once I get into the swing of things I should be able to schedule in my meetups. The company is really flexible and I at least have really great benefits like this 3 day weekend. I am getting a paid holiday after only a week of being there.

This weekend we Tanya, Gemma and I are going to have fun at frontier days and luckily it's right down the street from where we live.

One Month Rails Continues...

Ok, so after reviewing Ruby for the last few days and getting a better grasp of some of whats going on, I'm feeling much better and more confident. I still am unsure why my last app I started with One Month Rails was never able to get pushed to heroku. I have started the whole process over from scratch and was able to get my new One Month Rails app live on heroku.

I should have the app finished by the end of the day today if everything goes smoothly. You can check out my app at enigmatic-earth-3276.herokuapp.com

SO far everything has gone smoothly so up until this point I know I am not repeating the same mistake I had the first time around.

Total study time logged: 304 hours

More Ruby

For the last few days I have been going back and trying to understand Ruby a little better. I found it pretty cool I was able to get the structure of an app hammered out pretty quick and live as well. I just really want to understand and really look at all the code and try and understand whats going on. This is really fun and I figure I really should know especially because I moved through the first half of One Month Rails so fast.

I was really happy to get the domain I purchased on godaddy to work for my app. It didn't seem that hard at all to get all the forwarding set up. I was unsure at first if what I did actually worked but it just took about 14 hours to go through. It was overall an easy process on both godaddy and heroku to get everything all set up.

Total study time 280 Hours