I wrote my first post ages ago but then got super busy with projects at my job.

Since then, I’ve started working at a startup (in the marketing side, but I’m learning more database skills to better integrate my projects with the data team and also working on growth in addition to PMing projects here and there).

I’m learning at lot at my new job and most times I have a much better work/life balance than at the old company. Because of that, I’ve decided to bring this blog back from hibernation and use my increased free time to continue building my skills and then document what I’ve learned.

I’m starting up new projects and updating this blog as a way to learn different frameworks, experiment the fun new aspects brought to us by HTML5 and CSS3, and practice design (both visual and site architecture).

First Project: Building My Blog Using Ruby on Rails

I’ve been building sites on WordPress for years and have gained a working knowledge (though not as proficient as I’d like) of PHP from that. However, with rumors of PHP’s impending death, I want to make sure I futureproof both my site and my skills.

To get started with that, I’m studying Ruby fundamentals with Zed A. Shaw’s Learn Ruby the Hard Way and Codecademy. To practice and get experience, I’m going to use RubyOnRails.org’s build a blog tutorial in addition to the Heroku tips on reInteractive’s tutorial. I’m also going to learn how to use GitHub for “version tracking” and best practices.

I have some experience with making minor changes on Ruby code that co-workers at my current job have already made, running Ruby scripts to push data to vendors’ tools, and playing around with Jekyll. (The last one hasn’t gotten that far because of my aforementioned lack of Ruby skills). That’s all the experience I’ve got so far.

Style Screenshot

One thing that I’m going to do is document what I’ll call a “style screenshot” of Code Magellan’s current look-and-feel and include some information about the build.

This will be my way of reviewing my growth as a coder and designer. From using a site that’s just a quick install of the default theme to the super basic Ruby on Rails blog that I’m about to build, I’ll be able to see where I’ve come from (e.g. modifying already existing WordPress themes to build sites for friends, copying queries and modifying them for my data pull needs, having a basic working knowledge of Liquid tags, etc. as of April 2014) and compare it to where I currently am (in the process of learning to build things from scratch in Ruby on Rails).

As of today (Saturday, April 26, 2014) this is what Code Magellan looks like: