The Game Plan

After reading "10 tips for advancing from a beginner to an intermediate developer" that was shared by Austen, I began to focus more on where I wanted to take my programming. The article mentioned deliberate practice. I've been interested in this concept for a while so I researched it and wrote out what I discovered on deliberate practice. I am going to apply deliberate practice to my programming. I aim to advance from a beginner to an intermediate developer.

My plan is to become fluent in a programming language. I chose Ruby on Rails. I will enjoy building robust web applications. It is still growing and there is support for any help I may need. My deliberate practice will focus on learning the syntax, the built-in operators and libraries, and “how to use it.” I will be using online tutorials to get started. There are tutorials to build blogs, storage, and stores. I will be hacking away at these and anything else that comes my way. This will help me begin to learn the syntax, the built-in operators and libraries, and “how to use it.” When it starts to make sense, I will break it down to deliberately practice a certain part until I understand it.

I have been working on getting my machine ready for this plan. I have an iMac OS 10.4 (Tiger). I first had to find Xcode 2.5 to load. I finally found it at the Apple's Developer Connection. I then used Hivelogic's tutorial to build Ruby, Rails, Mongrel, and MySQL. Mine is a little different then the tutorial.

Put all software in usr/local and set path

installed readline 5.1

installed ruby 1.8.6

installed rubygems 1.3.5 (different)

installed rails 2.3.3

installed mongrel

installed subversion 1.6.5

installed capistrano

installed mysql 5.1.37

IT HAS BEGUN! The plan is in effect. This plan will help me get to my end game. I will become an intermediate developer and attain the ability to build my Trading Journal.