Post From December 2015

Reflections on TIY ATL

I got to meet tons of amazing and very very smart people here….not that there were not smart people in my life before…but once you walk through the glass doors at The Iron Yard….you can rest assured that the instructors and staff are very good at what they do. And your peers…your fellow students are going to be amazing problem solvers. We had many guest lecturers that are at the top of their fields.

To be successful here you must have the attitude that you will never give up…that there is always a way. And most importantly you must know how to work with people….I learned quite a lot by helping others de bug their code or fix their crashed server….probably some of my biggest highs were when I was able to help a friend that in turn would help me out with some gem or configuration I wasn’t used too. It’s telling the kind of experience one will have here when at the end of it, we all wish we could get jobs at the same place.

Reflections on Becoming a Junior Developer

One of our guest lecturers asked us if we could remember what it was like not knowing what we know now. For myself that is a definite no. While it was only three months ago the world looks a bit different. At the Iron Yard we spent countless hours of googling errors, reading documentation, and ploping our laptops in front of each other in an attempt to make sure we are not crazy and get some fresh eyes on our code. I’m not going say this was some spiritual awakening or anything, but doing those things day after day after day is bound to make you look at world differently, it will make you look at a problem and know there is a solution.

Getting lost to Help People

The immersive program at the Iron Yard first introduces you, and gets you comfortable with the “ecosystem” of programming. It’s a vast, beautiful, and scary world, full of libraries, and gems, and open-source code….good and bad documentation, and of course programming languages. It’s easy to get lost in all this and forget that this ecosystem exists to solve problems for people. It reminds me of my days as a music teacher when I would tell students that as soon as you decide that you are making music for a living, you give up your right to decide what good music is…the people that listen to your music will decide that. We could easily say the same thing about our code…that our code is good if it solves a problem for humans.

Reflections on What I’ve learned

This is definitely just the tip of the iceberg for the world of programming, and I am far from mastering any of these things…but here is a run down on the high level skills the Iron Yard has managed to cram into our brains.

In the first day you will get introduced to:

  • The terminal
  • The text editor of your choice
  • Version control and how to push things to github

Here is some screen shots of my terminal with the “homebrew” theme (top), and my text editor called sublime (bottom).

Not all programming languages are complicated or hard to learn, but you need to know a few to be able to deploy an application. I’m listing these in a more or less hard to easy to learn top to bottom.

  • Ruby
  • CSS
  • HTML
  • SQL
  • Markdown (which what is I’m using to make this blog post)

And here are some of the random technologies we have been introduced too

  • Rails (Active Record)
  • Heroku (Amazon Web Service)
  • S3 (AWS storage for file uploads)

It’s humbling to think of all the very smart people that created these tools. All these things can talk to each other to create stuff. One of the coolest feelings is when you’re about to start a new project and you type into your terminal…

rails new [application name3]

and all sorts of files explode on to your screen

After this first step you have all the tools listed and many many more that put you well on your way to creating an actual web application that if coded correctly will always run and have safe and secure data.

This has been an amazing experience with amazing people, and I can’t wait to see what in store for us.