Day one is done!

Day one at Coder Camps is in the bag. And what a day it was! The focus today was a lot of Javascript with a little HTML5.

We covered scope and hoisting in Javascript, including concepts like shadowing, closure, and higher order functions. Talked about encapsulation, callback functions, and the unique nature of Javascript compared to other programing languages. No classes, and all about the functions.  And functions can be parameters of other functions! - very cool.

We discovered anonymous functions - which makes you take a double take at first, but then you get it and suddenly there's another tool in the tool bag. We created our first libraries, got an intro to pair programing, and learned how to work debugging in Visual Studios.

Then lots of practice problem solving and writing functions.  You can't believe how much you can learn this quickly until you do it. I had classmates that took programing courses in college that said they learned more doing the Coder Camps pre-work than they did in their college programing classes. For anyone on the fence about learning to code by going to camp - DO IT! I learned more today than I could have in a week of independent study.

Plus, there was pizza and swag.  Great day.

On the Road, Part 3

End of the road! Made it to Houston earlier today and got moved into the "Hack Shack."  Met my housemates, and now just waiting for day one of Coder Camps.  Class starts tomorrow, and after four days of nothing but driving I'm anxious to get back to coding.

My future posts will be of a more technical nature as I report on what I'm learning and projects I'm working on.

To finish up with the road trip portion of this blog , here are some facts (and opinions) from this trip:

• Route: Vancouver, WA to Pearland, TX via Oregon, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico
• Total distance traveled: 2,229 miles
• Cheapest gas - Twin Falls, ID $3.42 (premium)
• Most expensive gas - Clovis, NM $3.73 (also premium)
• State with the best roads - Idaho
• Most scenic state - Utah
• Highest speed limit - Utah - 80 MPH
• Best gas mileage - From Moab, UT to Albuquerque, NM: 40.00 MPG
• Worst gas mileage - Vancouver, WA to La Grande, OR: 29.22 MPG
• Avg. gas mileage - 33.92 MPG
• Most courteous drivers - Texas
• Least courteous drivers - Salt Lake City
• Best non-avian wildlife seen from the road - Texas
• Best avian wildlife seen from the road - Oregon

On the Road, Part 2

Good morning from Albuquerque.

No wifi at the motel last night so posting from Starbucks this morning. There's always a Starbucks.

Coder Camps begins in just three days so my thoughts this morning have been turning to the programing and Web Dev skills I've already learned and what's to come.

Over the last few months I've learned a lot - The DOM model, common HTML5 / CSS3 elements and properties. How to structure an HTML document using a grid system. Bootstrap and Foundation. An intro to SCSS. Version control, specifically GitHub. Updated my command line skills. Learned a lot of Javascript, some Ruby, and intro to Rails, a good bit of C#, and brushed up on the concepts of Object Oriented Programing. I've done some work in Visual Studios and used Web Forms. Got an intro to AJAX, learned some Jquery, got an intro to Coffeescript, and learned to traverse the DOM. I've written functions, methods, and classes; and used enums, arrays, and hashes.

Absorbing new skills and information is coming easier and easier as I can relate new things to what I already know. The great thing is, there's always more to learn. Even after Coder Camps ends and I'm job-ready for that first Dev position, I'll have only scratched the surface.

I'm so grateful for the support of friends and family that has allowed me to make this career switch and go into a field where I can learn something (or many things!) new every day without end. Most especially, thank you to Dina Walden and Loyce Martinazzi - without your support I would not be here today.

As a reward to my readers, below are some pictures of the Salt Lake City skyline and the Wilson Arch in southern Utah. Bearing in mind that I haven't hit Texas yet and only traveled through a small corner of Colorado, I have to say Utah is hands down the most beautiful state I've traveled through on this road trip. You can't really understand the phrase "America the beautiful" when you travel by air - but by road - yeah, I get it now. And Utah certainly fits the bill. I didn't take theses - my camera phone really couldn't do the scenes justice.

Images sources: boomsbeat.com, woodchuckimages.com

On the Road, part 1

Heading to Houston for Coder Camps.  School starts Monday! Drove from Vancouver, WA to Salt Lake City, UT today.This is a 3.5 day trip hence the "part 1" in the title.

The last few hours I've been listening to Blink by Malcom Gladwell (audio book version). Heard two stories of attempts to improve outcomes (in war and ER diagnosis) by using automated/ computerized systems. One worked, the other did not. The one failed because it flooded the user with to much information and required too much effort to manipulate that information. The other succeeded by filtering out all but the most essential information.

Too much data can be a very bad thing. Information overload leaves users unable to tell the signal from the noise. Users end up making essentially random choices and their brains make up a justification for the choice which feels valid but isn't. I have no conclusions to draw from this right now (must sleep soon), but it seems like an interesting and valuable thing to keep in mind as a Web/Software Developer.

Some things I learned today in no particular order:

• You can buy fireworks year round in Idaho.


• Boise lies at the foot of some very pretty mountains.


• There are plateaus in central/southern Idaho.


• The speed limit in most of Idaho is 75 mph.  That seems fast until you hit Utah where is 80 mph!  Oregon/Washington seem very tame now with our 55/65 mph speed limits.


• The mountains in northern Utah are amazingly beautiful.


• Idaho has really nice roads, but they need better signs. Thank you GPS.


• Utah does not, apparently, believe in illuminating their freeway system. Very difficult to make out the lanes on a rainy night between Ogden and Salt Lake.


• Driving fast does not hurt your gas mileage as much as going over mountains.  From Vancouver, WA to La Grande, OR I drove 65-70 (mostly 70), went through some major elevation changes and averaged 29 MPG.  From La Grande to Twin Falls, ID I drove 75 mph, had to adjust speed due to traffic more frequently than the first leg of the trip, but it was pretty flat the whole way; I averaged 33 MPG.


• The traffic in Southern Idaho on I-84 is 40% semi-trucks.  It felt like 80% because that's all I was passing in my lane and I was not getting passed by many cars myself, but then I counted traffic in the opposing lanes and its 40%. (based on a survey on 50 vehicles on a Thursday afternoon).


• When bored after a long day of driving I start counting cars and trucks in the opposing lanes of traffic.

Almost there!

Coder Camps pre-work nearly complete! Just one section left. That said, that one section includes 18 subjects and 360 practice exercises. Still, hope to have it done this weekend; leaving Monday through Wednesday for independent study before the road trip to Houston Thursday.

The pre-work we've been assigned has included some of Khan Academy's Computer Science coursework and the ebook A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript by Mark Myers. I was worried that after Codecademy.com, TeamTreeHouse.com, and several other basic programming tutorials I've been through in the last few months this was going to be a lot of repetition.

Not the case! Khan Academy took a very different (and graphical) approach to teaching JavaScript basics compared to any of the other online resources I've used.  And A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript is just fantastic. Each chapter is very short and very readable.  But what really makes it work are the practice exercises . After each chapter (89 of them in all) you head over to the book's website and work through 20 problems related to that chapter. They are structured so that you really do learn the material, and quickly!

In other news:

The new laptop (The End of an 8 Year Relationship... With My Laptop.) arrived yesterday.  Took about an hour to ghost and install the SSD. Man, that thing is fast! Windows updates (73 of them!) took much longer, but its ready to go now.

The car is also ready for the 2000+ mile trip ahead of it next week.  Just took alignment, two new ties, and four new spark-plugs. It's running smoother than it has since I bought it.

This weekend will be very busy - two going away parties, plus visits to relatives, a visit to Oregon Wine Country (can't leave without one last date with my bride!), and all the last minute planing and packing for the trip.

I can't wait to get to camp. All the self-taught stuff I've been doing feels like its really coming together. Now I get to add expert instruction on top and really dive into full-stack development. Ten days 'till camp - I feel like a kid on Christmas Eve waiting for morning to come.

The End of an 8 Year Relationship... With My Laptop.

Yesterday I placed my order on Newegg.com  for my new laptop. Sometime this week a shiny new ASUS N56JR-EH71 will arrive at my doorstep, accompanied by a separate Crucial M500 480GB SSD, which I'll need to install myself.

And that means its finally time to retire my old Fujitsu T4020 Lifebook.

This was literally my first laptop, having only owned desktop systems previously.  I purchased it in January of 2006 to use when I went into real estate. Top of the line at the time, it came with Windows XP Tablet edition, 12.1" screen which rotated into tablet mode, a 2.00GHz Pentium processor, and 2 GB of RAM. Being a tablet hybrid it also had a stylus which I employed for signing contracts sans paper. (Which was both impressive and annoying to my clients.)

This thing has seem some wear and tear in it's day. My last stylus disappeared about three years ago. I've dropped it several times, onto both carpeted and hard surfaces.  The clasp that locks the screen into a closed position snapped off last year. The casing is cracked around the audio/microphone jacks. The LCD display for the battery life has a cracked section as well - which doesn't really matter since the batteries (internal plus expansion if you take out the optical drive) only last 15 minutes anyway. And when playing video or even loading a script-heavy web page, the long-suffering fan grinds its way up to max RPM's while issuing a surprisingly loud and gritty sounding groan of protest.

I once tried to disassemble it in order to clean out all the dust that is clogging up that fan unit.  I had to admit defeat after I still could not pry it apart with 27 screws out.

Admittedly, I pretty much only use it now when the TV is on and I need a larger screen than my phone affords me for secondary surfing. So not very often.  Still, to be in working (mostly) order without ever having a major hardware failure, and outliving Microsoft support of it's OS, I really have to hand it to that heavy little Fujitsu. You weren't cheap, but you gave me eight good years which is more I can say for any other computer I've owned.

I'll miss you buddy.

Heading to Houston

Well it's official, I'm heading to Houston at the end of March to take part in Coder Camps. Twelve weeks later I'll be hunting for my first junior developer job.

Deciding which school to attend was a challenging proposition. First, if you don't know what I've been up to the last month or so, I've been researching and preparing to attend a code boot camp.  A what? It's a full-time 8-16 week experience where you focus on nothing but acquiring and practicing the skills needed to become a web developer.

I started by looking up every program I could find across the country. In the end I had a list of my top twelve programs, spread out from Seattle to San Francisco, to New York.  I changed my mind on which program was my "top choice" repeatedly. Repeatedly.  There's a good chance I'll find my first job in the same place I go to school, so location and cost of living were factors, then there was length of program, start date, cost of tuition, and curriculum, including which languages and frameworks would be taught. This school boasts great job placement outcomes, that school has awesome job fairs...I kept notes in a lengthy spreadsheet.

While most schools teach Ruby on Rails a few teach .Net / C# instead (virtually all camps include Javascript). For anyone lost again, these things, "Ruby" and ".Net", are tools used for building websites.  Ruby is a language gaining in popularity and is often the choice of start ups. C# is popular with large businesses and corporations. My research shows there are more C# jobs than Ruby in the Portland area, but it varies from region to region.

I applied to the top programs on my list, went through interviews, tests - both logic and coding, technical interviews, and even answer the question "What's the most challenging thing you've ever done?" Then it came time to make the tough choice.  In the end Coder Camps won out due to a combination of factors not the least of which were an impressive record of post-graduation job placement, focus on .Net, and Houston's very reasonable cost of living.

One little perk to finally knowing where I'm going is that I can, for now, cross Ruby and Rails off my List of Things to Learn About Today. Now its down to just C#, .Net, Javascript, HTML, CSS, SCSS, GitHub, Command Line, and... the list goes on.

Still, the 5 days or so I've focused heavily on strengthening my CSS skills mainly because I just didn't want to invest a ton of time into C# or Ruby only to later attend a school that taught the other. Now I can safely dive back into C#.

So I've got that going for me, which is nice.