Leaving MDG to become a developer! (by Alice, Dir of Community)

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congratulations ma’am :smile:

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Best of luck alice , knew you would fall for coding !!!

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Congratulations on making the leap and best of luck!

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@aliceyu which coding school you have in mind?

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Thanks @aliceyu for all your help during your time at MDG! Wish you the best of luck in all future endeavours, and looking forward to future posts about your own Meteor projects :slight_smile:

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Congratulations Alice! Thanks for all you’ve done and hopefully we’ll still see you around in the Meteor forums.

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Best of luck for your new endeavours!

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All the best Alice on your future career! Was good to meet you in London a few months ago.

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Congratulations Alice! I was fortunate to attend several excellently produced devshops in SF. Best of luck to you!

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Wish you all the best Alice! Thanks for all your work and effort. :slight_smile:

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All the best Alice!

Was great to see you on that hangout that day (even though you couldn’t see me)

You’ll just love being a Meteor developer!

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Thanks everyone for all the nice replies – it means a lot to me. :smile:

I’ve been using Eloquent JavaScript by Marijn Haverbeke as my main JavaScript “textbook” and it’s been great so far (I’m up to Ch 6). The early chapters seem to cover basics well enough for someone who’s totally new to programming (though I did take CS 101 in college, years ago, so I don’t have a totally fresh perspective there). If you already know programming but not JavaScript in particular, you probably want to just skim the early chapters and then start in around Ch 5.

I particularly like Eloquent JavaScript’s exercises and the super-simple-but-effective coding sandbox that’s embedded throughout. It’s very easy to get in there and type things out yourself, try modifying stuff and running it, etc, which I think is important. And I like how the exercises are just a prompt and a sandbox, unlike e.g. Codecademy and Code School exercises, which will ask you to generate an extremely specific piece of code and complain if you name your variables differently from how they asked you to, or use different alert text, for example. I personally find that approach a little too restrictive and hand-holdy, and a lot of times I would feel like all I was doing was translating their pseudo-code into code and not actually solving the problem for myself. Eloquent JavaScript’s exercises were a lot more freeform and interesting to me.

A lot of people say Eloquent JavaScript gets significantly harder starting at Ch 5/6, and I would agree. Some things that help with that:

It also helps to go through the chapters and treat every example as an exercise, not just the challenges at the end. Read the code once, delete it, and try to recreate it yourself. You can refresh the page to get the original code back.

Other well-recommended resources that sound promising (I haven’t tried these yet, but plan to soon):

I’m applying to Hack Reactor here in San Francisco. Just did my technical interview yesterday, in fact! :smiley: I picked them because of their rigorous reputation and JavaScript emphasis. I’ve also met a lot of Hack Reactor graduates at Meteor Devshop SF and got a good impression that way.

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