I’m in the (very) gradual process of moving from my career as a pastry chef to one as a web developer. One of the steps I’ve taken towards that is that I’ve joined a group of volunteers working for a non-profit creating a Ruby on Rails site. This is a huge step forward for me, and I wanted to share some things I’d done differently up to this point.

One thing I think I did well on:

I decided early on that I liked JavsaScript, and that I was going to go ahead and focus more on JavaScript than Ruby on Rails (the two main choices when learning web development.) I also told myself though, to not close myself off to the idea of other languages. The advice I read is that once you start learning one language, it becomes easier to learn other languages. I totally embraced that attitude and I’m glad I did. The project I’m now a part of uses Ruby on Rails, and I’m not intimidated or scared about the idea of learning another language.

Pair programming:

I feel a bit like I let myself down by having done very little pair programming. Maybe at meetups/freeCodeCamp meetups? I would like to be more confident in the skills that I do have, but I understand that I probably would have to have been much more social in my learning for that to happen.

Git:

I will always say I should spend more time learning Git. I’m learning the commands now as I use them, but it feels clunky, and I hope one day to know many, many commands, and when to use them, without having to google it. Maybe finding projects to contribute to on Github would help this, but I often found it hard to find repos I would feel comfortable working on (see lack of confidence in the above)

The Terminal:

The terminal still freaks me out a little, but you have to use it if you want to work on a project with other people. I’ve gotten over most of my fear of it, when I spent one day just using the terminal to install updates and set up my laptop. Sure, I might not know many commands, but I’ll learn those as I need them, for now at least the fear is gone!

These are some of the things that I’ve been thinking about in the early stages of my being with this project. What I really like about being part of the project, is that it guides me to learn about specific things.