A month of Metis

By the end of today, it will have been 4 weeks since I started learning at Metis. There's a lot that I've learned, and it's impressive when I think of how now I have the fundamentals to already build something great.

If there's something that really draws me into programming, it's that sense of creation you have at your fingertips. You can code together magnificent pieces of software, like how an artisan handles his craft - this is the builder of the tech era.

At Metis, broadly the four weeks covered the following:

1. HTML/CSS
2. Ruby
3. PostgreSQL
4. Sinatra, irb
5. Ruby on Rails

Most importantly, I feel are not just knowing the tools that we have at our disposal, but also the fundamentals behind these tools, and practices that help us to be more effective and efficient. We've had to build from ground up methods in Ruby, Sinatra and Rails that are so easily simplified into one-line commands, or we've had periods of free time to come up with our own code and write a solution, and get what we want in our apps.

One huge draw is the fact that programming is like a game, or a puzzle. There's many ways to solve these puzzles, and you learn that some ways are faster than others, while others are more effective or clean to look at. There's a bit of joy when I go back to old code I've written, see what I've done, grin and rewrite what I could've done better now that I'm a month into the study.

I wrote some code for the zombie dictionary a few weeks back, now, and maybe when I go back to it it'll be significantly different by the end.

That said, over the weekends I'm slowly working on getting to know Vim, and while it more or less functions similarly between Unix and Windows systems, the fundamental differences between them will take me some time to adjust - for example, we utilize Homebrew, Vundle, Thoughtbot's RCM, and dotfiles to handle and manage packages, bundles and configuration settings for Vim. With the exception of Vundle which has its own set of installations for Windows, everything else is made for a UNIX system in mind. However, I'm learning of several softwares that emulate similarly. For homebrew, I've learned of chocolatey ; and quick searches for dotfile installers and bundlers for windows have turned up a few that I still need to go through.

Given this, an important thing that I learned is the core differences in how OSX handles its system-wide installations compared to Windows (which uses environmental variables to set PATHs), and the inner workings of the dotfiles we've been installing. Ultimately, it helps me understand what is being changed 'under the hood' when we brew a bundle or run RCM. (Most of the dotfiles change internal settings in Vim, Git, RailsVim and TMux among many others).

Like I said, there will be a part two for that, so that should be coming following further dives into converting from Sublime Text to Vim.