The Coding Life

  • The Calm Before the Storm


    Tomorrow I begin an important step in my journey learning to code. Leaving the teaching profession for a career in software development has been a long time coming. A year ago, wrote my first line of code. Three months ago, I sent off my last class of high school seniors. Now, I become the student.

  • Blogging for (Aspiring) Developers


    So you want to blog. Maybe you want to. Maybe you have to. Maybe you’ve become convinced it’s ‘what developers do.’ Regardless, there are some things to keep in mind, and some tools you should consider.

  • Learning to Code with Hack Reactor


    One year ago, I began a new journey. As the school year came to a close, this teacher began to look into what it would take to move into the world of tech. After a little research, it became clear that my course lay in web development. And with that, I started learning how to program.

  • Bringing It All Back Home With Node.js


    For the past couple of weeks I’ve been wading in the Node.js pool, trying to get my bearings. I know Node is in my future, and the experience of interacting with it after spending time on the front end has been enlightening.

  • My First Web App


    Months have passed since I first started down the road of learning to code, and lots of learning has taken place. For much of it, though, it has been book learning: tutorials, lectures, or literally reading books. There’s so much to learn that a certain amount of this is inevitable, but it’s come time for me to start making things. This web app is my first step.

  • My First Austin on Rails


    I’ve been going to meet ups for a while, but I’ve never gotten around to visiting Austin on Rails. This makes sense when you consider I’m not learning Rails, or Ruby for that matter. It’s reputation is top notch, however, and I’ve met Damon Clinkscales on a couple of occasions. This week was all lightning talks, and a few piqued my interest, so off I went, braving actual-winter weather in usually winter-less Austin. Here’s what jumped out at me.

  • Hack Reactor + Frontend Masters


    Sometimes things just drop into your lap. That happened to me this week with a JavaScript resource so perfectly timed as to make it seem–I don’t know–divine?

  • Learning Functions from ‘Single Page Web Applications’


    A couple of books have made their way into my orbit lately, and they both involved web applications. In my quest to Learn to Code, I’ve been stuck in the theoritical for a while now, and I’m jonesing to build something. Creating this web site was a good exercise, but while it involved plenty of tools I’ll use as a developer, it didn’t require much coding. Now, I want to start building.

  • We Are Live!


    It’s morning in America, and I’ve migrated over to a new web site, one of my own creation. It’s been a long time coming, but it’s finally here.

  • A New Jekyll Beginning


    After using Jekyll for this blog over the last month–having been introduced to it in my MakerSquare class–I’ve found a new way to use it: Prose.