Note taking when following a tutorial or attending something like a code school

I never took notes when following a book or online tutorial but now that I've dropped a lot of money on an online coding school, I want to make sure I type out information I'm learning. If I'm taking notes I'm kind of talking to myself as I do so that I'm going over the material a second time.  Now that I need to go back to refer to my notes, I figured out that I started out in a disorganized way.

Something that I learned when starting this school is that you can create a wiki or you can create Gists on Github.com. I'm using Gists as a note taking method. You can save each Gist as a certain file. The suggested way of taking notes (from what I've been told) is to use the Markdown language. A cheatsheet can be found here. I had heard of Markdown briefly before in some article I read but never gave it any notice. If you give your Gist a file extension of .md, it will display what you typed in as a formatted Markdown page.  Oh, because I didn't want people seeing my stupid comments and questions to myself, I flagged my notes as "secret" so that only I can see them.  If I share the link with anyone else, that would be able to see my notes as well.

Now that I'm getting into some material/topics in the online school where I'm needing to refer back to my notes, I'm wishing I had organized my notes in a completely different way.  I created a secret Gist for every single module or as Bloc calls them, checkpoints. I wish I had started a Gist for every topic. For example, I wish I had a Gist for all of my git notes, a gist for RSpec type notes, a Gist for command line notes and so on.

If I can get ahead in the material a little, I'm going to go back to combine my notes into topics rather than checkpoints.  If I could figure out how to search just my own Gists, it wouldn't be that bad but when I want to refer back to material I need to look at again, I have to remember what checkpoint Gist to go back to.

Anyway, hopefully I'll have more technical topics to share next week along with lessons learned.

Signed up for a coding school

Well, I signed up for an online coding school that's going to take me roughly 2 years to get through. Hopefully I get through it faster than that.  =)

I'm going to be learning Ruby on Rails, JavaScript, Angular and a few others. After my conference call with my instructor last night, I am now charged with creating a blog post once a week. The topics will be either a few notes I took going over the material or anything new that I've learned. The first module from what I can tell so far, covers Ruby, Markdown, Rails, Git, command line concepts and I just forked my first repository (a Jekyll template) 2 days ago and created a blogging application. Once I get more confident in knowing what I'm doing, I might move this blog over to the app that I created (well, forked, modified etc).

As far as my first post is concerned, I thought I'd give just the basic information of what I've gone over for the past 3 weeks.

I signed up with an online school called Bloc. The tuition isn't cheap by any means but so far I think it's worth it.

I'm signed up for the Software Engineering track which currently is divided up into 4 sections.

1. Rails Web Development
2. Front End Development
3. Software Engineering Principles
4. Open Source Apprenticeship

The first 2 are probably self explanatory. Number 3 entails learning more computer science type topics like data structures, algorithms, databases and SQL and design patterns. Number 4 basically has 2 sections...creating an open source project and then contributing to an existing open source project.

From what I can tell, I'm going to learn about the topics in the order that they appear in list above.

I'll post more detail about what I'm learning in my next blog entry which will probably be this weekend or if I get stuck on one of the exercises or assignments that I'm going back to now.

Cheers!