AMPed a Web Dev Adventure blog by amarkpark

Change Aplenty

2016.06.13

I’m a Ninja!

OK, so I’m not really a ninja… But I DID just have an “I’m a NINJA!” moment in my head.1 And it just occurred to me that I’ve been doing some crazy levelling-up on a LOT of fronts lately.

I’ve been applying to jobs like crazy and doing challenges and answering application-process questions for job applications and all of this has led me to some raging skill enhancement. At the same time I’ve also continued peer-mentoring, pair-coding, and contributing both directly and indirectly to a few OS projects, including a project I’ve been spearheading. I’ve added a ridiculous new breadth of knowledge in the last 5 or 6 weeks.

To add to the insanity, at some point a few weeks ago my Web Dev environment (I use Vagrant VMs so I can keep multiple parallel environments - whilst encapsulating them from my base system) got completely HOSED. That was the catalyst for a long-overdue2 system upgrade. I performed clean installs of VirtualBox and Vagrant while I learned the finer points of hosting parallel VMs in VirtualBox.

There’s been a WHOLE LOTTA UPGRADING GOING ON, both on the computer front and on the skills-enrichment front…

Ruby/Rails:

  • File I/O
  • Downloading and Unzipping zipped files
  • Folder and File redundancy checking
  • Stream I/O
  • Unzipping zipped files in place by reading the stream of the file
  • Parsing XML with Nokogiri
  • Rails Asset Pipeline (Bootstrap dun broke it, I dun fixed it)
  • Ruby Method Lookup Path (see the pretty gist)

Language Assimilation and practice:

  • Python (love, Love LOVE this language!)
  • JavaScript/jQuery (um… crickets)

Dev Environment Skills:

  • New Bash skills
  • Fixing what El Capitan did to BREAK MY FLIPPIN TERMINAL
  • Exploring the wonders of VirtualBox (OK so it’s another flavor of VMWare)
  • Exploring the wonders of Vagrant, Vagrantfiles and vagrant init
  • Praise and Glory be to the keepers of boxes
  • Gained a nice familiarity with Redis
  • Added new Jekyll skills and tools because Jekyll 3.x BROKE MY BLOG TEMPLATE AND MY DEV ENVIRONMENT BOTH! (Grr)
  • First forays into Node.JS
  • Learned a few and refreshed a few TDD skills with RSpec and FactoryGirl
  • Performance tweaking of OSX and Chrome to name a few
  • New Continuous Integration and Continuous Deployment skills
  • Team Building, Product Management and Project Management
  • Learned CSS Flexbox basics and manipulation
  • Added to Responsive CSS skills by incorporating a crazy SVG from Codepen and making it play nice in my new resumé page

And IN THE MEANTIME I also finally got around to learning a little of Yahoo’s PureCSS foundation/framework… probably more on that in a future post…

So while I’ve been crossing several items OFF my to-do list, as with any new insights, all that I have learned in the last several weeks has also ADDED at least an order of magnitude of NEW projects to the list… when will the madness end?

Oh yeah, that’s right… never.

~AMP

1. I’m not a Ninja, I don’t even play one on TV. Or usually use that phrase for that matter.

2. As a SysAdmin I was of the “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it” mentality. I was running OSX 10.7 until VERY recently. App support kept crumbling out from under me. Let me be very clear… 10.7 was A LOT MORE STABLE AND EFFICIENT than El Capitan in my limited experience, but I make performance improvements and hope for the best in the name of progress.

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