gSchool Week 0 - Why I'm Here

1 week down, 23 to go

This week was the first week of gSchool Ruby Cohort 1 (actually the second cohort, learn about zero indexing) and I’m excited to be part of a strong and diverse group of like-minded students. My classmastes are artists, veterans, butter makers, hardware programmers, and all Denverites for at least the next 6 months.

I enrolled in gSchool with three main learning goals: 1) teamwork, 2) philosophy, and 3) frameworks.

1. Teamwork
I’ve been teaching myself and hacking on Rails for about a year now. I’ve done the majority of my coding as the only contributor. My GitHub page is lonely most of the time. I can tell from this first week that the majority of our work (if not all) will be done with a pair or a team. I am excited to learn how to build software with others.

2. Philosophy
Meetups, Google, and StackOverflow can get you only so far. I can’t count how many times I’ve had a specific problem and found dozens of different ways to go about solving it. My pervailing philosophy has been to do what works and follow best practices (convention) whenever I know how to do so. I look forward to being steeped in a coherent and thorough coding philosophy.

3. Frameworks
Teamwork and philosophy are all well and good but without specific skills on which to execute you get nowhere. I know how to write Ruby scripts and build Rails apps. I’m now on the path to writing good scripts and bomb-proof apps. Ruby, Rails, and Javascript will be my canvas for the next 6 months.