After finishing the Thinkful FEWD course in January, my first objective was to put together a personal website to show off my work and skills, and establish a profile as a web developer. After a number of revisions I finally came up with something I was largely happy with, but never being completely satisfied I found myself continuing to obsess over and tweak the site when my time would have been much better spent developing my skills.
To that end I’ve gone back to basics and setup this blog using Jekyll. I had previously toyed with Wordpress and Ghost but so far the relative simplicity of Jekyll really appeals to me - being able to write posts in Sublime Text, with no internet connection required (while on a plane for example) is just one advantage over other platforms. Currently this site isn’t the prettiest thing around but that’s maybe fitting seeing as I see myself leaning more toward back end than front end development.
In the next few days I’ll be enrolling in Tealeaf’s Introduction to Ruby and Web Development course, which I’ll follow with their two other higher-level courses. I’ve been looking for a provider with a professional-grade curriculum to really get deep into Ruby and Rails and from everything I’ve read Tealeaf seems to fit that bill, and inspired by Patrick Jones’ post I’ll be writing about my experiences along the way. I’m close to finishing the famous Rails Tutorial by Michael Hartl for the second time so I’ll be writing about that soon also.