Thursday, September 20, 2012

Text Editors-1.5 hours for adding two numbers:)

I woke up at 6:45am today to go knock out several more chapters of Chris Pine's book "Learn to Program". I ended up spending 1.5 hours trying to get my text editor to work with the terminal, which is sad because the other night I had no problems at all.

I was using Text Mate to run the little snippets of code in Chris Pine's book, but my 30 trial ran out and I am too cheap to buy it for $50. So I thought well I'll just use Sublime Text 2, I've used it when I did Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial when I was trying to get into Dev Bootcamp, so no problem I thought.

Well apparently since I used it last Satan himself must have messed with it because I couldn't get ANY files to save, no matter what. I then spent the next 30-35 minutes trying to google ways to save files with Sublime Text 2 to know avail. My next approach was to try changing the default settings, which I finally succeeded in doing and got the files to save, most of the time. Another 15 minutes of trying to run the program in the terminal with no success, so I'm back to googling, after another 20 minutes I decide to try something different : the lot less cool but easier to use Text Wrangler. Well apparently the same curse was after me, no programs would run in the terminal either.

20 minutes later I realize the error is where I'm saving the file and then running the program in the command line in the wrong directory.

 Wow, what a moron! I just spent 1.5 hours, when the problem just needed me to 'cd' to a different directory. Well I didn't do any real programming, but I did reaquaint myself with the terminal and text editor so I feel dumb but I guess that was good I did learn something.

I still don't get why the Sublime Text 2 won't let me save files except in certain areas like Desktop but not in other places. I'm sure it's something simple that I don't understand yet, well that's what's cool about programming always something to learn for another day:)

Learn to Program

My wife, 2 kids and I just moved into our new place in Warrenton, Virginia. We had been hoping to ge into Flatiron School in Manhattan and were waiting to move till the last second, so things  have ben a little hectic getting a new place in 6 days.

Now time to seriously buckle down and learn. I decided to go through "Learn to Program" by Chris Pine. I've done other tutorials that are harder, but I've always heard it was good, and when I was interviewing for the Flatiron School in August Avi Flombaum the teacher had recommended going through it, so here I am.

I stayed up till 11:30pm got through 2 chapters, which have been very easy to do and understand so I'm happy about that. I'm going to be study in the A.M. at Starbucks before work so hopefully I can stay awake better, I am a Farrier (horse shoer) by day and a beginner Rubyist by night  Till next post.

Wednesday, September 5, 2012

Hello World!


This may not be the Olympics but in my mind it's just as serious. This is my journey to get into Flatiron School in NYC. I've tried once before and failed, this time I'm going for gold. No looking back.

Watch out people, one more Ruby on Rails developer is in training. Serious training.

 I'm writing this blog for 3 reasons: 
(1) To hold myself accountable to study. 

(2) To make myself try and understand it better by talking and explaining what it is I've been trying to learn. 

(3) To hopefully get to meet and talk to other similar like-minded learners that are trying to get into the Flatiron School 2013 spring session.