In my initial post I found myself gushing about Alterconf’s accessibility but as well as being the most accessible event I’ve ever been to, it boasted some amazing talks. So many in fact, that this post isn’t my final post on the conference.

Last Saturday I had the joy of spending the day at London’s very first Alterconf held at King (they of Candy Crush fame). The travelling conference series “works toward a more inclusive future” by providing space for marginalised people in technology and gaming and amplifying their voices.

Last weekend I dipped my toes into the world of Test Driven Development (TDD). Knowing that this would be a big part of the course at Makers, I knew I’d have to get my head around it eventually - my only prior experience being the pre-written tests that appear in Codewars kata.

Humans don’t always learn from patterns. Many of us end falling in the same cycles without ever getting wise and changing our behaviour - this has been true for my attempts to learn how to code. I’d really get into the swing of things and make a lot of progress but as surely as Spring follows Winter, every few months I would find myself completely and utterly absorbed in a work project leaving me without the time or energy to work on anything coding-related. This could be months, and I would return to my laptop, deflated, and unable to remember how to access a hash. So I finally bit the bullet. In a few months I’ll be leaving my job and starting a three-month bootcamp at Makers Academy.

Despite toying around with HTML and CSS for years now, I’d ever actually built and deployed a website. Until now! A very sudden change in circumstances led me to finally finish building and deploying my personal website. That change in circumstance? I was made redundant.

I’ve found myself in the rather odd situation of having a lot of time to dedicate to coding. My company has decided that they might need to make me redundant but in the meantime, I’m on paid leave. A blessing in disguise perhaps.

I say defeated by Ruby, that’s not quite correct. I’m yet to reach a stage where I could be defeated by Ruby as I have struck a wall installing it on my computer. I was following this Codemy video to a t, but it all went wrong when I saw three numbers; 2.0.0. Specifically:

This is far from the beginning of my coding journey. It all began a few ago when I made an attempt the teach myself html and css through Codecademy, and then, simply, stopped.