Gotta start somewhere right?

So over the course of the last two weeks, I haven't quite updated my blog the way I hoped, or had much of a chance to do any significant practice or studying with coding. I did have a nice trip up to Chicago though and got to meet some co-workers and see an old college buddy. Being in Chicago gives me such an itch to pick up and move there as well - I've always been drawn to Chicago & NY.

Anyway, I figured lunch today would be as good as any to type out a few thoughts in between bites. To be honest, today's topic is as much for me as it is for anybody that actually reads along :)  I have an idea for an application I'm going to work on, and wanted to do a "before" post so that six months or a year down the road, I can look back and see where I started. 

I mentioned to a few of the developers that I was interested in learning how to program, and the guys I sit around have a focus towards Ruby on Rails, so they recommended "Agile Web Development with Rails 4" as a good book to follow along with. I actually got the book about a month or two back, and have slowly started working my way through. Through a good chunk of the book, it lets you follow along with building an eCommerce site which they call  the Depot application. However, this past weekend I decided on an idea for a new application that I would try to build while following along with their examples. 

Problem: I prefer to cook healthier options at home, but I never know what to cook

Solution: Just for the fun of it, I want to build a site where I can upload the recipes I like, and then use a random generator to pull recipes. If I can figure out how to do it, I may add in features to choose between Breakfast, Lunch, & Dinner options, or maybe even choose between types of Dishes (i.e. Chicken, Pork, Fish). 

I'm hoping to use some of the same functionality of the Depot project such as adding new products (new recipes). As I begin to progress, I'll upload to github (austi003) if you'd like to follow along or see my code. Hopefully I can get something working, even if it's not the most professional looking! 

At this point, my experience is primarily the classes I took as a CS minor in college, along with 2-3 months of sporadic studying I've been doing, but I wanted to rate myself before I get started:

• HTML/CSS/JavaScript - (4 or 5) - I took a number of classes on HTML/CSS/JS in college, and have probably done the most work here. Especially for HTML/CSS, I know a lot of the basic syntax and can follow along with the code even if I can't write it all off the top of my head. For most projects, I probably know enough that between my knowledge, and using Stackoverflow or a google search, I can figure out how to do what I need to.

• Ruby (1 or 2) - This is the first object oriented language I'm learning, primarily because the developer next to me gave me a problem to solve in Ruby. I've at least started learning about the overall syntax and what methods & classes, & types of variables, etc. At this point, I would still consider myself very basic though. Here is a sample screenshot of my code, and once again you can find it on Github.

• Ruby on Rails (About the same) - I at least understand conceptually the whole MVC concept and hopefully will learn a lot more about Rails as I go

So that's my starting point and level of knowledge, let's see where it takes me! On one quick side note, our quarterly Hack-a-thon at CareerBuilder takes place tomorrow starting at 9 am - I'm working on an idea with two of our engineers and it's my first Hack-a-thon to participate in, so I'm pretty excited! Feel free to follow along on Twitter @cb_Shaun and probably the tags #careerbuilder or #cbhackathon - I'll try to post some pictures and updates throughout the day/night.