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Day 6 at MakerSquare. Week 2. This time, I’m in a new building, which is really the old building. The atmosphere is different, but that might just be the absence of glass walls and paint fumes. Upsides: standing desk and a coffee maker.Downsides: one bathroom for 20+ dudes and too much coffee. Back-end now happens in the morning, which is the opposite of last week. I’m not sure if it’s better or worse [but it’s probably neither - “Man is disturbed not by things, but by the views he takes of them”]. Dug deep into Ruby classes with my new pair. Seeing as I’m writing this after catching up on the morning’s work [at 2245], maybe we dug too deep. If we hadn’t though, I wouldn’t have learned that the ‘puts’ method looks for a custom 'to_s’ method in classes, and print that output as opposed to the unreadable-by-human object! My notes from that moment read as, “implicit class methods to make objects readable?! mind blown!” ...

Day 5 at MakerSquare. Friday is Tie Day. & also project day. Front-end: Pick a website and redesign it. I had originally picked the site for my favorite diner in town, Kerbey Lane. Excellent pancakes, cluttered website. It was correctly suggested that the scope of that redesign would be too much. I then picked another local institution, Austin Books & Comics. I started by sketching out some mockups and jumped in. No good. No good at all. ...

Day 4 at MakerSquare. Started with explanations of why and how things happen here, which is always awesome. I like to understand thought processes and how decisions are made, especially related to design [speaking in the broadest sense of the word]. We were reminded of the Three Pillars to be instilled in us: teamwork, independence, and a love of problem solving. All noble qualities. This reminds me - I need to see if there’s a Twitter account that automatically sends out quotes from Stoic philosphers. If not, well, I’ll add it to the to-do list. ...

Day 3 at MakerSquare. A pun-y morning with wireframing and CSS layout. Looking back at the web design I’ve done in the past [which involved a vicious amount of Googling about <div> and floats and inline-blocks], I’m excited about developing the skillz to quickly iterate on designs I’ve sketched out. No more sweating over how the introduction of a new paragraph could break the layout. They say that by suffering with manual CSS layout, we will develop a greater appreciation for frameworks. Without having touched a single one of them, I can confirm that yes, frameworks are awesome. ...

Day Two at MakerSquare. First full day of class. Front end in the morning: Mostly stretching the HTML/CSS muscles and practicing pair programming. Realized that float:left and float:right size the element down to the width of the child element - light bulb! Starting to scratch the surface of best practices, from using “-u” in the initial git push to writing in the present tense for git messages. And, enjoyably, making the Sublime Text experience even more awesome by tweaking settings and learning shortcuts. ...

Day One at MakerSquare. Half day, on account of the Veteran’s Day parade, which I sadly missed. Heard that the oldest surviving WWII vet was there. Richard Overton. 107 years old. From Bastrop County, Texas, born in 1906. From the Great War to the Depression to the Pacific Theater to television to the civil rights movement to a man on the moon to Watergate to the oil crisis to the moral majority to the dot com era to 9/11 to a persistent world wide web to the recession to the present day. ...

0. Completed the entire “Web Fundamentals” Track on Codecademy 1. Completed the “Ruby in 100 Minutes” Tutorial 2. Completed the “Ruby” Track on Codecademy 3. Completed the “Ruby Primer” Course on RubyMonk 4. Completed Terminal Basics 5. Complete through Exercise 11 “Moving a File” of the “Learn Code the Hard Way” Book 6. Completed the JavaScript Track by Codecademy 7. Completed “Try jQuery” by CodeSchool 8. Completed all of “jQuery” by Codecademy This was the necessary prework ahead of MakerSquare. I’m looking forward to the day when I can comfortably and clearly explain everything that I have learned through these sites. For now, though, it’s lots of sketching, experimenting, doc reading, and staring thoughtfully at irb. ...

Finally learned enough jQuery to update my website from “copied-and-pasted jQuery that sorta works sometimes” to “works gooder all the time.” Small steps. 

Howdy. This blog is a map of my path toward and through MakerSquare. Code snippets, revelations, and general musings are to follow.