Week 13 at gSchool: Local Business Projects and thoughtbot Tutorial

Cameron Buckingham is a student at gSchool, a 6-month coding school in Colorado (now Galvanize). He blogs each week about his experience at gSchool- this week, Cameron talks about working on projects with local businesses, a thoughtbot-sponsored Ruby on Rails tutorial, and updates us on the RubyConf San Diego conference he's applied to speak at. 

Remember, the Course Report community is eligible for a $500 scholarship to gSchool!

A huge change occurred in our program over the past week. We have gotten the opportunity to work on select projects with local businesses to improve our coding school. So in essence, the focus has shifted to working with live code bases and moved away from lecture-filled days. gSchool is responsible for setting up contracts with businesses that allow us as students to hop into current projects and write code. These projects have offered several students the chance to meet the business owners and discuss with them their vision and help them get there. 

We currently have three businesses involved in this program, so not all students are able to be a part of it yet. Although the goal is to alternate people in and out of the program as features are completed within the code base. The people who are not yet involved, are working on their personal projects or finishing select tutorials. I am slotted to work on a project next week so I used this week to catch up on some great video tutorials that I had been putting off to complete my personal project. 

For anyone looking to learn Ruby on Rails, I highly suggest enrolling in an Upcase class. These classes are sponsored by thoughtbot and contain about 5-7 videos that range from 30-90 minutes long that teach you how to understand the Ruby and Rails frameworks. They also offer video tutorials are other platforms like IOS, VIM, Javascript, or Backbone.js. I completed the basic session of Ruby on Rails this week and I must say, that is the powerful learning platform out there for me right now. When I first learned about programming I stumbled through a lot of learning courses but didn't fully grasped the concepts they were teaching. At this point in the class I get most of the concepts that are presented to us now, so these videos on Upcase were much easier to follow. I even found myself jumping ahead or even using shortcuts to make my code better.

Another thing on my radar this week is awaiting an answer from RubyConf San Diego on my talk. If selected, I will get to give a talk to a couple hundred people on the developer bootcamp business and some of the challenges and successes it has had over the past several years. I would really like to give the talk, so I will update you on whether I get it or not on my next post! Thanks for reading!

Want to learn more about gSchool? Check out their School Page on Course Report or their website here!