Blogging for hackers.

Hello. I am starting this blog specifically to talk about my upcoming dive into web development. I have been doing “programmery stuff” for a while (a few months, a few years, 15 years, depends on your definition) but I start at the Flatiron School in 3 weeks for their Ruby 005 Cohort and am seriously jumping in. From some intense googling, I am under the impression that we may have to keep a technical blog, so I figured I’d go ahead and get one started now, even if it’s not a requirement.

Like a good hacker newbie, I diligently checked out Octopress, which defines itself as “a blogging framework for hackers.” It’s based on Jekyll, integrates easily with Github Pages, and overall seemed like the right choice for what I will be doing since it requires a little more know-how than a one-click Wordpress install.

And no joke! It was a workout. I’m at novice-comfortable level with Ruby/Rails, Git, and the command line and have never used Sass/SCSS, Haml, or Markdown. But I expected to install it in twenty minutes and feel like this:

But ended up spending over an hour and a truly embarrassing number of commits (I just checked – 52 total!) and feeling more like this:

I got it working enough to do this and modify the theme a little bit, but barely. I haven’t sorted out the problem of having to run ‘bundle exec’ in front of every rake command or figured out why I have two different folders for this blog, but I’m at least dedicated to figuring that out. And figuring out many more future problems publicly, here. I’m a pretty private person when it comes to most things, but am forcing myself to be okay with being very publicly “dumb” when it comes to programming and web development. The tech field needs a lot of things, but something it really needs is the death of the “elitist hacker” mentality, and the rise of collaboration, empathy, and knowing that it’s okay to not know something.

Still, I’m looking forward to going from hammering out problems like this:

To hammering them out like this:

Wish me luck! Either personally or below when I get a chance to figure out how to turn comments on. It’s gonna be a long journey.