I’ve been off the radar lately because I’ve been heads down in Ruby on Rails 5 Essential Training. But I’m back in the blog because I just finished! Special thanks to Kirk Keeter for teaching his free “Build Web/Mobile Apps with Ruby on Rails, Node.js and React.js” class at Dallas Makerspace. This course was part of the homework for that class, and although I had watched the course before, I went through it beginning to end, even not peeking at the solutions when given challenges. I was surprised at how close my code resembled Kevin Skoglund’s answers. I also practiced atomic commits during this course, and now when I progress too far, or feel myself venturing outside the scope of my current task, I feel a force pulling me back.

I’ve still got a lot to learn, and I never want to stop. I probably work too much, even to the point that I called my girlfriend “Ruby” the other day. That’s not her name, and I had to explain that even though I’d fallen in love Ruby, she had nothing to worry about. I’ve been in this zone before where my focus filters my physical reality. When Nintendo 64 came out, I played Golden Eye so obsessively for hours at a time that when I reentered the real world, things would still look 64-bit to me. I also experienced this filtering when I played Gears of War a few years back. That’s what it takes to get into the top 100 on the leaderboards, I suppose! I want to do the same with Ruby, Rails, and whatever else I dive into. Basically become a top 1% programmer.