Day 132: Tech Recruiter Meetup

Offhand Notes on the Tech Recruiter Meetup

I went to a meetup today for Austin tech folks.  The meetup was really fun, I was exposed to more of the Austin tech scene, and the person in charge of Austin Digital Jobs, Lani Rosales, was there. It was nice to see her in person, because I always see her posts and the posts from members of her Facebook group in my news feed, and the content is always high quality, tech-related/job-related content. I'm thankful for how much she contributes to the Austin scene.

In addition to Lani Rosales, there were representatives from OnPrem (Jessica Chavez), IBM (Anna McCormick), Agile Velocity (Brett Simon), and Luna Data Solutions (Lucas Mitchell), for example. I found out that Lani is also in charge of a website, www.theamericangenius.com, which is a website for entrepreneurs. I'll have to check it out.

The speakers emphasized over and over how big a factor personality-fit is in the hiring process, and also, once on the job. You have to be able to get along with your teammates, so no throwing bottles at the wall when some code wasn't able to be rolled out when needed, and you have to be able to deal with the firm executives, who may have type A personalities, according to the speaker.

Luna Data Solutions has 195 different clients in Austin, and some of those clients need remote work done. The speaker mentioned that when analyzing candidates, github accounts are looked at to see how active the candidate is, and also social media (such as linked in), to see how active we are in the tech scene.

Two of the speakers mentioned that the application process includes homework assignments that test how good you are at understanding a problem and using available resources to come up with a solution. One of the speakers mentioned not to be negative when you are rejected (common sense, but yeah, don't burn bridges). One speaker mentioned how a recruiter is able to influence whether you are hired or not, but does not actually make the call. The person with the money gets to decide who gets hired.

One of the speakers mentioned that his two best hires were a high school grad and a PhD, and that software development is a meritocracy, you will get paid what you are worth based on how much work you've put in. Another speaker mentioned that some corporations do look for a degree. Another speaker (Dylan Tano, Keystoke) mentioned that as long as the person knows his stuff, that's what's important. That said, the person needs to be able to sell themselves to others, people need to have confidence that you know your stuff. Another speaker mentioned that recruiters really look at what work you've done and who/what organization can vouch for your skills. Github or a personal website are both good at selling yourself.

One of the speakers mentioned that Google Hangouts is used as part of the interview process. A speaker mentioned, regarding code tests/assignment, "Did you run your unit tests? If not, that's a problem!"  I haven't studied testing yet, so I'm not familiar with how to do it, although I know that you're supposed to. Another speaker mentioned that a resume will not get you a job, it will be one piece, out of several, that can open a door to the interview. That speaker mentioned that as a candidate, you should know the realities of the job, so that you are not a bad fit for the actual job if you get it.

Another speaker mentioned that you've got to have an online presence, and if you don't, your resume may be automatically tossed out. Another speaker, regarding advice for transitioning from non-tech to tech, said that you really have to be intellectually curious about the subject matter you're intending to work on. Two of the speakers had bachelor's degrees in English. One of them said you have to be willing to work on your own, at home, on projects you care about. You've got to be passionate about this. You have to be passionate, especially anyone that's making the transition from a non-technical skill set to a technical skill set, because they've got a lot of ground to make up. Instead of trying to become an employee of the company, try to sell your skills to the company, for example, if you were an accountant before you learned to code, sell that part of you. Speak to the "why" aspect of why you should be hired.

Another speaker mentioned Austin has a very rich design community, and that they're looking for people that know other people, in person. This can be done via attending meetups and via other digital/design community events. Also, it's important to note that not a single web developer in the U.S.A. has a bachelor's degree in web development.

Another recruiter mentioned that it's o.k. to ask for things from other people, in regards to networking. She believes that the Austin community is very generous with networking opportunities. We have to continue to learn, so if we want to be in this field we have to be passionate about learning. A speaker mentioned that every Friday at her company they allocate 4 hours to presentations/learning activities, for example, one engineer may make a presentation for the company on a new JavaScript framework, and every employee will be upbeat about it, and you should too if you want to work there. One of the speakers mentioned we should always be working on our own projects, and to definitely consider starting your own startup, or several startups.  A speaker mentioned that mistakes happen, to not lose your cool whenever you crash things, which you will, especially as a junior dev.

In regards to breadth versus depth, the speakers felt you should simply represent what you're good at. If you can do everything, awesome, present yourself as a full stack developer. If you're a specialist at one technology, then make sure to highlight that on your resume. One speaker mentioned initial interviews tend to be 60/40 personality fit/technical expertise, while the later, 2nd, 3rd, 4th interviews (which often have tests) are then more technical. Several speakers mentioned, "Are you curious? Do you want to learn? What type of technologies do you not know that you want to learn? Will you be a good fit?" If someone on the inside speaks for you from within the organization, then that speaks for your culture fit and can fast forward you to the technical section. Also, in contrast to the other speakers, a speaker from a big company, IBM, mentioned that they look at your technical competences first, before you can even get an interview.

Many of the companies are small groups, so that's why personal fit is so important. One speaker mentioned that the members of the team do a survival style vote on new candidates. Another speaker mentioned she wants developers to be humble and nice, especially around non-developers such as herself and clients.

The threshold of skill level for entry level positions. One speaker (Lucas) said they have a team of three developers that did nothing but HTML for three months, and then they plan on keeping two of the developers at the end of those three months. A speaker said a new hire's code was not super good, but his code documentation was AMAZING, and that was why he was hired. She said that was super important because it let everyone know that he cared about communicating with other team members, about making sure other team members understood why he did what he did.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 199)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                33% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 2

Total Hours Coding: 597

Day 131: Ch 61 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

Today, I'm starting with Chapter 61 The DOM: Junk Artifacts and Nodetype.  There's 89 chapters in the book, so that means I'm a little over two thirds of the way done.  I've learned quite a bit, and it makes me really happy to see myself getting closer and closer to my goal of becoming a web developer.

I learned about junk artifacts, which are placeholder text nodes which the browser inserts at various points, such as carriage returns.  These artifacts make moving through the nodes more cumbersome, and various ways have been devised to get around this.  One way, when wanting to target a particular element, for example, the text node within a paragraph element node, is by giving the paragraph an id and then directing JavaScript to go straight to it, like so:

document.getElementById("p2").innerHTML = "All his men.";

The code replaces the text node within "p2" with the string, "All his men."  This code:

var nType = targetNode.nodeType;

Returns a number.  A 1 means the targeted node (you don't type "targeted node," you type in the variable that represents the targeted node) is an element node, while a 3 means the targeted node is a text node.

Okay, I finished chapter 61, now I'm working on Chapter 62 The DOM: More Ways to Target Elements.   

I finished Chapter 62, which introduced .lastChild, .firstChild, .parentNode, .nextSibling, and .previousSibling.  I'll start tomorrow off on Chapter 63 The DOM: Getting a Target's Name.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 199)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 2

Total Hours Coding: 595

Day 130: Ch. 60 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

I played around a little bit with that initial website project, www.adancode.com today.  I haven't paid any attention to it, preferring to use my github account and linked in for networking and showing my projects, but once I get a larger number of projects to show, I'll update that site.  For today, though, I wanted to make a change to an image on the site, to practice, and it was pretty easy, all I did was replace the old image with a new image and I named the new file the same as the old file in the FTP, and that was that.  No further changes needed because all the html pointed to the same location. 
 
It's great because I feel pretty comfortable with using the FTP software now, it's been a while since I last used it, and it only took a couple of minutes to do what I wanted to do.

So, I started earlier today on Chapter 60 The DOM: Finding Children.  If we take this code as the starting point:

<body>
    <div id="cal">
      <p>Southern Cal is sunny.</p>
      <p>Northern Cal is rainy.</p>
      <p>Eastern Cal is desert.</p>
    </div>
    <div id="ny">
      <p>Urban NY is crowded</p>
      <p>Rural NY is sparse.</p>
    </div>
</body>

Then all the code below can be used to read the contents of the last paragraph of the markup.

var div = document.getElementById("ny");
var p = div.getElementsByTagName("p");
var lastP = p[1].innerHTML;

OR

var p = document.getElementsByTagName("p");
var contents = p[4].innerHTML;

OR

var p = document.childNodes[0].childNodes[1].childNodes[1];
var contents = p.innerHTML;

The third version is the one that I'm learning about in this chapter.  In practice, though, we would usually code something like this to target that same text inside the second paragraph under the "ny" div:

var d = document.getElementById("ny");
var p = d.childNodes[1];
var contents = p.innerHTML; 

This is interesting:

<div id="sample">
  <p>This is a<em>piece</em> of a larger puzzle.</p>
</div>

For the code above, this code:

var d = document.getElementById("sample");
var emElement = d.childNodes[0].childNodes[1];

Would pull the <em> element, which is neat, so the "This is a" would be the first child of the <p> element, the <em> element is the second child of the <p> element, and the "of a larger puzzle" is the 3rd child of the <p> element.  This is because any element enclosed by another element is a child of that element, so the text element is the first, the <em> tag is the second, and the last text element is the 3rd.

Okay, I finished chapter 60.  The next chapter is Chapter 61 The DOM: Junk Artifacts and Nodetype.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 199)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 2

Total Hours Coding: 593

Day 129: Ch. 55 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

I started today on Chapter 55, Setting Styles.  Okay, I've completed that chapter. 

Now I'm on Chapter 56 Target All Elements By Tag Name.  Okay, I've completed that chapter.

Now I'm on Chapter 57 Target Some Elements By Tag Name.  Okay, I've completed that chapter.

Now I'm on Chapter 58 The DOM.  So, this chapter is the longest chapter so far in the book, and I've really been looking forward to it.  Today's been great! 

So the DOM is simply a model that organizes a website into a hierarchical organization chart, with the goal of being able to locate any part of the site.  The different subdivisions of a site are called nodes.  Multiple paragraphs within a div, for example, are co-equal nodes, so one is not ranked lower than another simply because it is lower on the webpage.

There are three kinds of nodes, document, element, and text.  Usually, a page starts with a document node, then comes the html (element) node, followed by the head (element) and the body (element) node, which are co-nodes, then the head node has a title (element) node within it and a text node within that.  The body node meanwhile has it's own title nodes within it and paragraph nodes and text nodes within that.  

Okay, I completed chapter 58.

Now I'm on Chapter 59 The DOM: Parents and Children.

Okay, I completed chapter 59.

Now I'm on Chapter 60 The DOM: Finding Children.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 177)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 3

Total Hours Coding: 591

Day 128: Ch. 53 "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript" and Buzzmill Coffee Shout Out!

I found a neat coffee shop called Buzz Mill, in Austin.  I studied here last night until like 3 a.m.  The music is a bit loud in the main area, but that's okay, because there's a quiet room if I ever want it to be real quiet, and also, I have some special ear plugs that fit really well, so I can wear them, but sometimes they have interesting music, so it can be pleasant background sound anyhow.  

What I really like about the place is that they are open 24/7, so I can do long stretches of studying without having to relocate, and also, it's got a really great vibe, like if I want to take a break from studying, I can go to the outside section and watch a band if there is a band putting on a show (it's Austin, "Live Music Capital of the World").  Also, they post the wi-fi login on a little chalkboard that looks like it's a cross-section of a log, which means I don't have to ask them for it if it changes, but it looks like they don't change it too often, or at all, which is even better, unlike other places that change it frequently and make you ask every time, sometimes having to stand in line for a while to do so.  Sure, having to ask for the wi-fi password every single time (at the places that change it frequently) is usually only a minor inconvenience, but nonetheless, as a business owner myself who takes pride in providing top notch service to my clients, I enjoy that this place values my time enough to streamline the process as much as possible.  

In sum, they're my kind of business, I feel really comfortable here, and that's the main thing, so until that changes, it's going to be my go-to spot for coding!  I recommend it, check it out if you're in Austin!

I started today on Chapter 53 Swapping Images.  We used functions to swap images when a used clicked on an image (onClick) or hovered over an image (onMouseover).  

Okay, I finished chapter 53, and now I'm on Chapter 54 Swapping Images and Setting Classes.  Okay, I finished chapter 54.  Next is Chapter 55 Setting Styles.  

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 155)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 3

Total Hours Coding: 588

Day 127: Ch. 51, "A Smarter Way to Learn JavaScript"

Today I went at Chapter 51 Reading and Setting Paragraph Text.  We used this code:

<p id="slowLoris">
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.<a href="javascript:void();"onClick="expandLoris();">Click for more.</a></p>  

It makes the paragraph have a link at the end that says "Click for more."  When the user clicks it, the paragraph expands, that is, new content is added to it.  In order to make it expand to this:

Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.  It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.

We would need to use this function (you can name the function whatever you want, within variable rules):

function expandLoris() {
  var expandedParagraph = "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.";
  document.getElementById("slowLoris").innerHTML = expandedParagraph;
}

Remember that that function would usually be in a separate JavaScript file, while the original paragraph would be in the initial html file.  Here's the html file I used, and you can see the link to the external JavaScript file right above the body tag:

 <!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<head>
  <title>Display Modes</title>
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/normalize.css">
  <link rel="stylesheet" href="css/style.css">
</head>
<body>
<p id="slowLoris">
Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book.<a href="javascript:void();"onClick="expandLoris();">Click for more.</a></p>
 <script src="myscripts.js"></script>
</body>
</html>

And then here's the JavaScript code (the file, in this case, was named myscript.js):

function expandLoris() {
  var expandedParagraph = "Lorem Ipsum is simply dummy text of the printing and typesetting industry. Lorem Ipsum has been the industry's standard dummy text ever since the 1500s, when an unknown printer took a galley of type and scrambled it to make a type specimen book. It has survived not only five centuries, but also the leap into electronic typesetting, remaining essentially unchanged. It was popularised in the 1960s with the release of Letraset sheets containing Lorem Ipsum passages, and more recently with desktop publishing software like Aldus PageMaker including versions of Lorem Ipsum.";
  document.getElementById("slowLoris").innerHTML = expandedParagraph;
}

The book actually didn't go over the linking to the JavaScript instruction in this chapter, because we had already gone over that earlier, but since I wanted to test out the material on an actual document, I went ahead and set up an html file, a JavaScript file, and linked the two.  I love how everything keeps building on everything else.  

Okay, I finished Chapter 51, next is Chapter 52 Manipulating Images and Text.  In order to give a user the option to have an image disappear, you first give the image an id, like so:

<img src="picture.jpg" id="picone">

Then we add an event handler:

<img src="picture.jpg" id="picone" onClick="makeInvisible();">

As an aside:

document.getElementById(sampleElementId).innerHTML; 

Is for paragraphs, divs, and other HTML elements, while:

document.getElementById(sampleElementId).value;

Is for form fields.  

Back to images, then, there's a CSS class for invisibility:

.hidden {display:none;}

And here is the function that gives the image a class of "hidden," so that is disappears.

function makeInvisible() {
  document.getElementById("picone").className = "hidden";
} 

If you want to add a new class to the element, but also retain any classes it already has, you would do that like so:

function makeInvisible() {
  document.getElementById("picone").className += " classname(like hidden)";
} 

Make sure to put a space before the class name in the += version.  O.k., I completed chapter 52, next is Chapter 53 Swapping Images.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 155)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 3

Total Hours Coding: 585

Day 126: Linked in, The Odin Project Study Group, and Student Blogs

Today I visited the Odin Project study group on Facebook and worked on my Linked in Profile.  I made linked in connections with my fellow students in the study group and I also added links to my blog (this one) and to my GitHub on my linked in profile.

I also looked up blogs made by other Odin Project students, it was a pretty inspiring day, especially reading a certain blog post by one student whose journey was very similar to mine.  He took two years to go from starting studying html and css to landing a position as a developer.  He also, like me, got distracted with studying web design through a lack of an organized curriculum.  He also, like me, enjoyed the Treehouse courses, and then found the Odin Project's structured curriculum to be the next step.  He mentioned that he did quite a few 12 hour days within the process, and on a sample week in his blog he had about 20 hours one week and 30 hours another week.  That means he was doing about 4 to 6 hours a day on those weeks.  That's much more than I've been putting in lately, but he went through the same things I did, for example, of going a whole month or two without doing any studying, and then getting back on track.  It was really great to read his post, but out of respect for his privacy, I won't be posting a link to it.

That said, it was amazingly inspiring. 

I signed up for a website called code wars.  To sign up, you first had to pass two code challenges, but they were really simple.  I'll explore the website further later.

SUMMARY OF CODING SKILLS

Total Treehouse Points: 5,385
Treehouse Points by Subject Matter (Miscellaneous not included): 
HTML:                                663 
CSS:                                1,599 
Design:                            1,193 
Development Tools:            747 
Javascript:                      1,120

Treehouse Ranking (%): "You have more total points than 94% of all students."

Treehouse Badge(s) Earned Today:

Treehouse Courses Completed:
How to Make a Website
HTML
CSS Foundations
CSS Layout Techniques

Aesthetic Foundations
Design Foundations
Adobe Photoshop Foundations
Adobe Illustrator Foundations (66% complete, switched focus from web design to web dev)
Git Basics
Introduction to Programming
Javascript Basics

Codecademy (& other) Courses Completed:
HTML and CSS (Codecademy) 

Books Read or in Progress:
Completed: "Head First HTML and CSS," by E. Robson & E. Freeman
In Progress: "Eloquent JavaScript," by Marijn Haverbeke (On pg 27)
In Progress: "Head First Javascript," by Eric Freeman and Elisabeth Robson (On pg 56)
In Progress: "A Smarter Way to Learn Javascript," by Mark Myers (on pg 155)

My Progress on The Odin Project:

1.  Introduction to Web Development             100% Complete

2.  Web Development 101                                29% Complete

3.  Ruby Programming                                       0% Complete

4.  Ruby on Rails                                               0% Complete

5.  HTML5 and CSS3                                           0% Complete

6.  Javascript and JQuery                                  0% Complete

7.  Getting Hired as a Web Developer                 0% Complete

Hours Spent Coding Today: 3

Total Hours Coding: 582