by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

[cross-posted from gitinit.wordpress.com]

Ha! For once, the default title of a WordPress blog is relevant! Because as all programmers know, and anyone dipping their toes in the field will quickly discover, the first program of just about any language you learn to write is one that produces or displays the text “Hello world!”

So, yes, hello world. I’m Joan, and I’m teaching myself Ruby on Rails with the help of the fantastic Ruby on Rails Tutorial. There are always more “rabbit holes” though, and I’m also learning about version control with Git and hosting copies of my open source code on GitHub, and scalable hosting on Heroku (free for small projects). I run up against various problems with my code, then have to track down the source of my errors and figure out how to fix it, and often get side-tracked with other things I’m learning as I dig into the problem. Bugs in my code are annoying (I didn’t get it right!) but I definitely learn a lot from solving them, and hopefully I can share that knowledge with other people here. I expect the technical level of the writing to start fairly low and go up over time as I run into more challenging problems than “Where did I end up with a typo?” or “Why does Heroku make it so hard to find their relevant support documents?”