The Beginning

Hello inaugural blog post!

Welcome to my new blog. Many people reading this may be familiar with imposter syndrome... and that's what I've had for months, a huge amount of self-doubt. I've been "learning" Ruby on Rails for a year now. I put learning in quotes because I feel like I've only really started understanding in the past 8 weeks.

My journey started last September at the first Rails Girls DC workshop. Well, actually, that's not true. I guess my journey started the previous March at Day of Fosterly. I had just recently started to get involved in startups in DC, determined to change industries from the Jewish non-profit world I had worked in since college. Day of Fosterly was my first big startup event. I knew very few people and spent most of the day trying to silently self-encourage myself to meet as many people as possible. I had heard a bit about coding and learning to code but since I hadn't taken a math class since high school, assumed I would be way out of my league. So, there I was in line for lunch and happened to meet three awesome individuals: Jim Gay, Piotr Steinnger, and Liz Steininger. They were all developers/in tech. When I mentioned wanting to learn how to code I immediately got a huge amount of positive reinforcement. For the next 45 minutes, I learned about meetups, resources, and the Ruby community.

I didn't make any moves until September when I attended the Rails Girls DC workshop (which Liz organized and Piotr was my mentor there). I had just gotten going with my own startup and decided to learn the basics so that I could converse intelligently with my awesome developers. From that September until this July, I learned in bits and pieces, mostly when I was scoping out a new feature or idea with my development team. It was in late July that I decided to spend less time focusing on my startup and more time learning how to code. So, for the last eight week or so I've spent every day, morning till night, coding, learning and getting to know the community.

Throughout this time, I've been thinking of starting a blog but was pretty certain no one would care about anything that I had to say. After much encouragement though, here it is, the blog. I'll be writing a little about my journey and what I've done over the past eight weeks (and somewhat before that) to learn as well as posting issues I come across (and hopefully the way I solved them)!