I have just completed my project for the JavaScript section of the Flairon Software Engineering bootcamp and during this process I learned some very valuable skills, especially pertaining to JavaScript.
I just completed the Rails section of the Flatiron Software Engineering bootcamp and one of the valuable lessons that I learned while completing my final Rails project is the power of effective debugging. As any seasoned programmer will tell you, deubgging is a required everyday activity performed by software engineers and therefore it is cruicial to develop strong debugging skills in order to ensure your success as a software developer. And while I am still fairly new in my own journey into becoming a software developer, I can already see how important it is.
Part of the FlatIron Bootcamp curriculum is to create a web application using Sinatra, a framework built on top of the Ruby language (http://sinatrarb.com/). Sinatra was developed by Blake Mizerany and is described as a “DSL for quickly creating web applications in Ruby with minimal effort”. Being that this is my first framework to use and learn, I cannot compare it’s difficultiness relative to other frameworks but I can say that I was able to grasp the basic understanding of it in about a week. Once I did a couple of small projects on it through the FlatIron curriculum, I found it pretty easy to develop my own web app from scratch. The most difficult part that I found was 1) coming up with a solid idea for a web app, and 2) setting up and making sure my ActiveRecord associations were working properly. Overall I really enjoyed the experience of building this web app and it has given me an appreciation for all of the gem’s and framework’s that are out there for web developers’ use.
I’ve officially made it through the Object Oriented Programming (OOP) section of the Ruby track of the FlatIron Software Engineering bootcamp and as it is for all of the other sections of the course, we were given a project to complete that would reinforce our understanding of the material we learned (in this case, Object Oriented Programming & Web Scraping). The requirements for the project were to create a CLI (Command Line Interface) program that scrapes HTML / CSS data from a website of our choosing and presents a menu (at least one level deep) to the user of our program. Beyond that, the rest of the requirements were open to our choosing.
Well I am in Week 6 of the online, part-time Software Engineering coding bootcamp at FlatIron and I had every intention to write this post earlier but I have honestly been quite busy with managing course work and daily life but as they say, better late than never. So here we go. I wanted to document my journey in becoming a software engineer / web developer as sort of a diary for myself to reflect on later and maybe also as an inspiration for other individuals who are thinking about making a similar move. I’ll start off by saying a little bit about myself. I hold two degrees, a B.S. in Geology and a M.Eng in Petroleum Engineering. I am a Petroleum Engineer by experience and profession and have worked in the oil & gas industry (upstream side) for nearly 15 years. I was born & raised in Texas and although I have no family in the oil & gas industry it kind of fell into my lap after undergrad as I ended up taking the first job offer that I received after graduation which just so happened to be in oil & gas. From there, I discovered that the money in oil & gas is quite good and that sort of hooked me into it. I did have quite a passion for it as well which motivated me to enroll in graduate school to pursue my Master’s in Petr Eng while working full-time. But then came the downturn..