This site gives me the impression that after successfully completing the course I will be able to be hired as a developer. Assuming that I pick up the concepts and can apply them - is this reasonable? My gut tells me no, but I'm not in the business.
At night (and in the early mornings and sometimes at lunch...) I have been teaching myself to program Rails apps. I use books to learn concepts (and RailsCasts too) and I rely on Google and Stack Overflow for problem solving when I get stuck.
I have learned a ton, not only about the language but also about good programming practices. For the latter, I tend to first learn the concept from a book, but only internalize it after having suffered some pain which could have been avoided if I had been using that particular practice. So far I would include orthogonality, version control, testing and asynchronously running processes which I don't control to this list. Behavior Driven Development is also now starting seem like a real benefit and not just overhead so I will try that with my next feature addition.
I guess my question is, how far down the road does one have to go before they could be considered as a potential employee?
The companies we're partnering with (Living Social, WordPress/Automattic and Bank Simple) will tell us they want to look at folks who meet certain criteria, like this:
1. Looking for a job
2. Have unlocked these badges (as an example):
2a. UX Foundations
2b. Ruby Foundations
2c. Rails Foundations
3c. Node.js Foundations
Then we'll present them with those people and they'll choose if they want to approach those folks to interview
At night (and in the early mornings and sometimes at lunch...) I have been teaching myself to program Rails apps. I use books to learn concepts (and RailsCasts too) and I rely on Google and Stack Overflow for problem solving when I get stuck.
I have learned a ton, not only about the language but also about good programming practices. For the latter, I tend to first learn the concept from a book, but only internalize it after having suffered some pain which could have been avoided if I had been using that particular practice. So far I would include orthogonality, version control, testing and asynchronously running processes which I don't control to this list. Behavior Driven Development is also now starting seem like a real benefit and not just overhead so I will try that with my next feature addition.
I guess my question is, how far down the road does one have to go before they could be considered as a potential employee?