@pauljacobson
#Enthusiast, runner, coder, Happiness Engineer at @automattic . Passionate about my wife and #proudDad.
I am a former lawyer and marketing writer. I now work for Automattic helping our customers build and maintain awesome WordPress sites.
I'm pretty comfortable with HTML and CSS. I enjoy tinkering with Python, shell scripting, and SQL queries. I'm particularly interested in back-end development, and aspects of the data science world.
Nothing here yet.
No blogs yet.
I intend maintaining my momentum from the last 8 months or so. My goals are to keep learning, shift to more practical learning, and develop a better grasp on my fundamentals so I don't find myself having completely forgotten how to write a working function!
Hi There is definitely a learning curve for Node and I'm still figuring it out. Fortunately there are a lot of resources you can look to. One of the courses I did is Wes Bos' Learn Node course. It makes more sense if you know some JavaScript ES6 (I did his ES6 course too). As for Python, I didn't learn enough to get to a point where I could write the sort of code I'd use on a site so I can't be much help there, unfortunately. I bought Learn Python the Hard Way (I have 2.7.x and 3.x), and intend working through that course in the new year (once I feel like I have a decent grasp of JavaScript). That said, I contribute to an open source project that uses Python on the back-end for routing and module imports. I haven't spent a lot of time exploring the Python side (I'm mostly working on the front-end side of the project) but I can see similarities between how Python handles aspects of the site and languages like PHP and Node.
I'm in a similar position as you. I've been working on a couple of projects for the last 5 months or so. I've been pretty focused on JavaScript so I decided to develop my projects using HTML/CSS/JavaScript to strengthen my grasp of these core languages. I want to get back to Python and learn Python 3.x in the new year. At the same time, I was advised to stick with one language and become really good at it (I sometimes have a tendency to bounce around a little) so I've been learning JavaScript on the client side as well as on the back-end (using Node, Ember, React). As it happens, I'm working on two bigger projects and a couple smaller ones. I decided to build all of them in these three languages. It's a great way to learn more, and put what I've learned into practice. My suggestion is to use the languages you've learned and do as much as you can with those languages. Obviously if there are languages better suited for your project, use that. That said, I tend towards following the slightly harder route because I really want to nail down the fundamentals.
Thanks. I have the equation generation and rendering working (mostly, I need to work in two constraints and modify how the equations are generated). The one challenge I have now is this particular one because I need a basis to assess answers the kids give. From here, my plan is to record their progress in local storage so they can not only get feedback as they go but also review progress for each session.
For starters, you're at IBM which is a remarkable opportunity in itself. You don't want to give up on that too soon. Certainly not before you've really given it a chance. As far as how long you wait before making a move, I don't know. At the same time, one month seems like a really short time period to make a decision like that. The company will want to make better use of your skills so I'd be surprised if you are still doing low level going forward. Stick it out for a while longer.