The Ro Code: Starting To Code Is Not Hard, Just Scary As Hell
On a scale of M.I.A. and incognito, I am Houdini’s apprentice. Just about every contract has ended, emails are set to auto-reply and my contacts hang on thin thread of you’ll-be-back-in-two-months-time-right? Hah, well…
So I was climbing up a coconut tree this one time in a floating village, yeah? (This is me trying to start from the beginning). It wasn’t even to stick a straw in the damn fruit/nut/hybrid and be all tourist like, either. There I was in the island of Borneo, collecting data on scholarship recipients in rural communities. When I proposed the idea, I decided that it was going to be a live report, meaning all the info would be pushed out on social media in real time. Meaning I needed access to the internet. In a floating village. In the middle of Borneo, Indonesia. I had set myself up for the impossible.
That’s where the coconut tree comes in, right. I plugged in my nifty wi-fi USB stick and free-climbed this giant tropical plant, hoping the interweb gods would be so kind as to grant me the impossible – and they did. I’ll never forget the feeling. For one thing, I totally kicked campaigning ass, but more than that I realized one core epiphany that rearranged my neurons at that moment. Sounds like a sick story and all but, man, climbing a coconut tree is not shits and giggles. You don’t do it just to come back and tell story (well, maybe you do but this wasn’t the time to do it), it was for a determined purpose and with it I realized everything changed. (I’m going to get real philosophical here, bear with me). I realized that no matter what I did ahead of me, if it didn’t make my molecules morph into a stronger hulk-like state and make me instantly think ‘I will climb a coconut tree to get this off the ground at cheetah speeds’, it was not worth it.
I have found my next coconut tree and it is made out of variables and syntax and avoiding the dreaded endless loop at all costs: for the next two months I will be immersed in coding bootcamp at Lighthouse Labs. Cue laughter, silent pauses, crickets, please.
Thank you.
When I founded the tech section at VancityBuzz, it was mostly because I had all this great info from clients and start-ups doing sweet things locally. Now I’m ready to flip it, remix it, and build my own something.
Ruby on Rails is the name of the game at Lighthouse Labs. The first time I tried to tell someone they laughed at me for about ten minutes straight because I said I was learning “Rubies”. If this course is suppose to scare the hell out of you by constantly showcasing what you do not know, it’s doing a damn good job. 2 months of starting from scratch in learning a language I’ve only heard clients speak. Laugh now, but my secret weapons lie in these babies:
true && true # => true
true && false # => false
false && true # => false
false && false # => false
true || true # => true
true || false # => true
false || true # => true
false || false # => false
Behold, the magic of &&, II and !, the coolest operators around, the AND, the OR and the NOT. Logical truth tables that power the backend of things which in Ruby lingo are known as boolean operators. Okay, I’ll lay off the hardcore lingo. Here’s a collection of the sweetest things off the internet. Take it as a list of mini goals. By the time my Lighthouse Labs escapades are done, I shall be able to have created my own versions of these:
I don’t even know, man. It is useless in all ways except for the purpose of being such a 90’s turn on for the DOS that still lives in all of us. I see that emulator running, foo’.
Where The F**** Should I Go Eat 
Simple, straight forward, hangry friendly. This is the search engine of all search engine.
This one is just honestly for self esteem and stress relief. YOU WANT CODE?! I CAN CODE. CLICKITY CLICKITY.
It’s been two months of prep course work, a combination of Code Academy and gamified versions of CSS and Ruby. See you next time, when the real terror really begins.
‘The Ro Code’ is a VancityBuzz exclusive blog delving into the course material, instructors and all round coding happenings at Lighthouse Labs. For more information on the next cohort, check out lighthouselabs.ca and get lost into a vortex of possibilities.
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