Broadening Focus

On Dec. 14th, I was fortunate to discover the Fredericton Developer User Group.  I attended their meeting and then was really fortunate to head down to the Garrison for a pint and a chat.

During our conversation, I discovered that some in the group had Ruby-on-Rails experience, but had found that Fredericton employment centered on .Net and Java skills.  It was great just to chat about living and working here.

In the end, I decided to broaden my focus to include C# and jQuery, as these appear to be skills in demand.

For the next week, I worked on C# (using video tutorials from PluralSight).  These were very helpful, but boring, as the strategy for beginners is to go through basic language constructs.  I'm more used to a "learn by doing" approach, where the tutorial builds something and then explains the concepts we're using as we go.  That being said, I did learn a number of things, and was surprised to find that C# is a 'toned down' version of C++ (from my 20-year-old memories) but more powerful than I remember VB and Excel Macros being.  So, the concepts were fairly easy to grasp while the API is what it is.

Then, I went to move onto jQuery, but decided that the best way forward was to take the humble approach and do the JavaScript tutorial first.  Surprisingly, this was a huge benefit, as I discovered I had never really understood the underlying structures of JavaScript.  (In the years gone by, JavaScript was so clumsy that I had decided to avoid it altogether in favour of boring HTML and a page-load with every click.  In the years that I've been away, it's amazing to see how much faster and useful JavaScript (and, by extension, AJAX) has become.)

To date, I still haven't completed the jQuery videos, as I keep getting distracted by other things.  For instance, in looking into the CSS code, I discovered SCSS/SASS and thought it was awesome.  When I looked up "gradient" features, I was put onto Compass - which looked awesome but I have yet to get gradients working with Compass.  Eight hours working on Compass haven't yielded any results.  ...Groan...  Either I haven't got the API working correctly, or the "gradient" features are currently under construction... or both.

What have I learned through this whole process?

1. I learn better with people around me.  (Learning by myself, even with video tutorials, has gone against the grain of my learning style.)
2. Just because the install and 'getting started' instructions SAY that it's really easy to use, these are usually written by an expert (or even the original developer) and often don't reflect a newbie's experience.
3. Visual Studio Express can be a useful IDE, but has been significantly hobbled by Microsoft when they cut plug-in capability.  (Yes, technically 'template' plug-ins still work.  However, the plug-ins that matter, like Mindscape Web Workbench, that would have made SCSS/SASS awesome, don't.)
4. With VSE2010 hobbled, you'll need to be familiar with the DOS command line and batch files, especially if you want SCSS/SASS to work.  Very useful SCSS/SASS newbie instructions here (also good notes here and here.)
5. So, with all of the above in mind, keep a good text editor around.  I use all of these, at various times:
   - Notepad++ (Windows only)
   - VI, vim, gVIM (*nix, Windows)
   - gEdit (*nix)
   - edit (Windows command-line only, in a pinch)
   Thanks to all of you who have recommended (over and over) to use TextMate.  Now, if only I had the $$$ to get a new computer (i.e. Mac.....)

The next meeting for the FDUG is on Jan. 11, so I'm looking forward to learning more about I.T. employment in Fredericton.