Our cohort of students has graduated from the Coding Dojo. Now a number of us are engaged in the “engineer in residence” program which is focused on getting projects finished and deployed along with job search skills and techniques.
In the last handful of weeks I have learned a new language–Ruby–and tried out a couple ways to serve web pages using it: first with Sinatra, then with Rails. While working on understanding the Rails MVC structure and its ActiveRecord ORM tool for databases, I started a on few projects including a yoga teaching platform (a codebase that I intend to continue to enhance with input from my yogi wife) and a social bookmarking tool. With working betas of these projects done and having worked through the Dojo material (which heavily emphasized test driven development [TDD]), I was finally ready to take on the Rails black belt exam.
Now that I can call myself a Coding Dojo blackbelt, I am looking forward to many upcoming coding challenges, including building some new projects on the MEAN stack using NodeJS.