When making the decision to start a new career, you might find yourself a little lost. This can lead to a lot of online searches, reading articles and books on the subject at hand, and trying to understand quite a bit of contradictory advice. Instead of more online searches and questions posted to forums, the best investment you can make is in finding a mentor to help you through the maze. Throughout my journey, I’ve come across great mentors, and have been starting to see patterns that emerge during a mentorship that make the relationship valuable and fulfilling for both parties.

A little background

I wasn’t new to computers five months ago when I started gSchool, a 6-month intensive & immersive course in learning Ruby and Ruby on Rails, but I might as well had been.

I had spent the previous six years as a web designer who had a knack for getting things to work right. I had set up VPS servers, built up content management systems, and even began building lead generation systems from scratch in PHP with MySQL backends. I had heard acronyms like OO and MVC, but really didn’t know how to program in an object-oriented way, or why models, views, and controllers even mattered. I came to gSchool thinking I would naturally be a top student, as I had been in other courses and programs. I quickly realized this wasn’t the case, but it took me some time to come to terms with that. Looking back on the last five months I think I know why, and hope to be able to help others learning how to program understand what is happening if they come across similar frustrations.

In our current Rails project, my team is building FreshFinder, a community-edited Farmer’s Market finder, with reviews. The main data we are using in our application, prior to user contributions, is data that we are pulling from Data.gov’s Excel spreadsheet of USDA Farmer’s Market Data.

This past week, gSchool continued on while I took a few steps into the Ohio developer community. I’ve been to conferences before, but not as a Ruby developer.

56 days from now, 26 students from gSchool will be closing their laptops, saying their goodbyes, and getting ready to start their careers as software developers.

Last week marked the halfway point for gSchool. We had our second assessments, using the instructions from the Intermediate Scrabble repo and requirements.

Last week, we finished up our Dinner Dash project in Rails. It was a great first dive into Rails, and I had a lot of fun learning about ActiveRecord, ActiveSupport, and all of the helper methods.

It’s amazing to look back on my time here at gSchool and realize that at this point in time, if I were in a shorter bootcamp program, I’d be graduating today.

I had a few issues installing Rails for the first time with PostgreSQL locally, and since the problems I was having as a newbie in both were not well-documented on the internet, I thought I’d post a rundown of what happened and how I fixed it.

This week, we started a quick-turnaround project in Sinatra called Clone Wars. Our challenge was to pick one of five local businesses, build a CMS for their existing types of content, and then scrape their existing website into our database — all in three days.