You're not alone. Many people make the same mistakes you do :)

"Did you really think you could make changes to the database by editing the schema file? Who are you, Amelia Bedelia?" The silly mistakes we all made when first learning Rails may be funny to us now, but we should remember how we felt at the time. New developers don't always realize senior developers were once beginners too and may assume they are the first and last developer to mix up when to use the rails and rake commands. This talk is a lighthearted examination of the kinds of common errors many Rails developers make and will dig into why so many of us make the same mistakes.

Please watch Amelia Bedelia Learns to Code, and write a blog post with your reactions to it. Any mistakes you've made that seem commonplace? Any tips you'll remember for the future?

We started off the week reviewing the weekend's reddit lab. The workload ramped up dramatically last week, and many of us were left scrambling to complete assignments. As a result, Monday predominantly consisted of review and Monday's homework was to watch the "Amelia Bedelia Learns to Code" talk by Kylie Stradley from the 2015 RailsConf. The takeaway from the video is that developers make mistakes. I'll say that again. ALL DEVELOPERS MAKE MISTAKES.

This message comes at a great time. A quick flip through of my recent favorited articles/blog posts shows that this message is not only a recurrent theme, but also a topic I'm currently wrestling with. One article that resonated with me is "6 Reasons Why Perfectionism Kills Your Productivity " by Ellen Eldridge. The point of the article is that sometimes it's more important to start a project, make progess, and cherish creativity than it is to fret and plan for a perfect outcome. I often find myself in some limbo state of anxiety-procrastination driven by unrealistic expectations and the desire to suceed on my first attempt. This routine sucks. In addition to causing unnecessary stress, the root of this routine tends to be based on expectations I (and me alone) put on myself. So while transitioning away from this prefectionist-ic M.O. may take time, it seems that the dev community definitely has my back. (And look! I'm off to such a great start.. Is 'perfectionistic' a real word? Who knows? But it works here, so moving on..) It takes a tremendous amount of confidence to broadcast our mistakes. But the dev community operates under the notion that 'mistakes happen' and development isn't a skill we wake up with one day. Rather, developers understand that learning to code, to create, to develop is a PROCESS. A process that progresses by making your own errors, working through said errors, and then adding the skills gained during this process to your knowledge-base. So in the spirit of cherishing mistakes, here's the number one mistake and lesson I encountered during my first five weeks at The Iron Yard:

• Mistake: thinking git sucks
  • It took a couple of weeks for me to understand that git (and github in particular) is my friend.
  • After finishing an assignment, I'd git init git add . git commit -m "Initial commit" git push origin master my entire project with one go.
  • On lab 2, I pushed to a branch on github then git pull origin master'ed and thought I lost my whole project since it wasn't visible in my local directory or in the github master. Super silly looking back, but utter panic at the time.
  • That experience not only forced me to read more about git and how branching works, but it also worked to encourage me to commit smaller chunks of code throughout the course of a project.
  • As a result, I moved from "git is a big scary code-deleting monster" to "'small commits often' allows me to revert back to previous code at any time". Lesson learned.