My quest for true understanding is doomed to frustration

Progress Bars

Free Code Camp: Reached a milestone-- Finished "Waypoints", now entering the "Bonfires" section of their program. Finished brief lessons on Chrome DevTools, Regex searches.  Other markers: start date May 8 + seven weeks, score points 117 (out of ?).

Others:

• Hello Web App by Tracy Osborn. Finished reading.
• Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, Third Edition:  Moved to non-progressing bars.
• Listening to The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson, at bedtime. Now on chapters about early 1970s, founding stories of Microsoft and Apple.
• Wanting to get Kindle book  Joomla 3 Explained (2nd Edition), by Stephen Burge, from Joomla Press. (Published August 7, 2014. Doesn't cover new Joomla 3.4 release.)
• Really wishing I were in the MITx CS6.00 Python class that started on June 10. :(

Non progressing (or nonlinearly progressing):

• LinuxFoundationX: LFS101x.2 Introduction to Linux. 
• Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition by Jon Loeliger & Matthew McCullough: p 130 of 416. (31%) 
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer, by Sandi Metz. Read through chapter 6 of 9. 

Bootstrap hope and joy

OK, this is silly, but I just discovered Bootstrap and it's making me cry with relief. Ever since CSS was announced as our supposed liberation from HTML Table layouts (1996?!), I've been waiting for CSS become usable (or at least better than Tables)... I think this may finally be it! The era (decade?!) where web page creation and I parted ways may finally be over...

Also: Free Code Camp chat member "david" posted the following graphic today. A nice little jiāyoú 加油  :)

And today, I finished Free Code Camp thru Waypoint #13 ( aka Codecademy "Make a Website (Airbnb home page), 3 hours"). Next FCC task: Codecademy jQuery, 3 hrs.

Finished Codecademy Ruby course

When did I start? Looking back over this blog... Sometime between Feb 9 and Feb 27. That means it took me three months of stolen moments to complete the "nine-hour" course. :(

Progress bars:

Newly Started:

• Hello Web App by Tracy Osborn. Got a Kindle edition.
• Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial, Third Edition: Paper edition finally came out. Might do this as reading, and do my typing via FreeCodeCamp...
• FreeCodeCamp.com - trying this. Feels attractive. Welcoming to us over-30 nonprofity types. Staffer (founder?) guy "QuincyLarson" was nice to me in site chat. I've finished all their introductory "about us" lessons ("Waypoints" 1-8) and am now obediently doing the first real assignment, Waypoint #9 (which turns out to be yet another Codecademy course-- sigh.)
• Also got a copy of The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution by Walter Isaacson. My liberal arts brain thinks this should count for something.

Recently Finished:

• Ruby Wizardry: An Introduction to Programming for Kids by Eric Weinstein. 
• Codecademy.com Intro to Ruby nine-hour course. 

Non progressing (or nonlinearly progressing):

• LinuxFoundationX: LFS101x.2 Introduction to Linux. 
• Version Control with Git, 2nd Edition by Jon Loeliger & Matthew McCullough: p 130 of 416. (31%) 
• Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby: An Agile Primer, by Sandi Metz. Read through chapter 6 of 9. 
• Michael Hartl's Ruby on Rails Tutorial: completed tasks through chapter 2 of 12. 

Totally shelved-- the intro chapters gave me enough of a sense, for now:

• Nand to Tetris Coursera course (completed most of Week One) and Elements of Computing Systems textbook by Noam Nisan and Shimon Schocken (read through chapter four).
• Unity 4.x Game Development by Example Beginner's Guide, by Ryan Henson Creighton.: 69% complete. (No progress since Dec 13-- switched focus.)

freecodecamp.com

It takes about 1,600 hours of coding to develop the skills you'll need to get an entry level software engineering job.
Most coding bootcamps try to jam all this into 3 or 4 months of intensive study. Free Code Camp is fully online, and there will always be other people at your skill level that you can pair program with, so you can learn at your own pace. Here are some example coding schedules: 

Time budgeted --- Hours per week --- Weeks to complete
Weekends  --- 10 hours/week  --- 160 weeks (36 months)
Nights and Weekends  --- 20 hours/week  --- 80 weeks (18 months)
Full time  --- 40 hours/week  --- 40 weeks (9 months)
Traditional Bootcamp Pacing  --- 80 hours/week  --- 20 weeks (5 months)

It's hard to not feel discouraged by this info. Three or four years of my current life seems very depressing. And I can't pretend I am even really doing 10 hours/week successfully.

Also I must be amused by the use of the word "Traditional" in "Traditional Bootcamp."

Thanks DevChix for the link to freecodecamp.com though. It looks interesting.

----
PS Reading the chat at freecodecamp led me to this similar site: "The Odin Project". Ruby on Rails. Free. But, clear macho (nerd-macho) theme. And, none of the fun little checkboxes that FreeCodeCamp has :)

Ruby Wizardry: An Introduction to Programming for Kids by Eric Weinstein

Ruby Wizardry: An Introduction to Programming for Kids by Eric Weinstein.

I finished it!

I'm thinking I like Eric Weinstein, but not really Ruby. Too chaotic.

If I return to Python, will it be as orderly as I remember it as?

Ah well. Python is not next on the list. Linux is. After finishing the silly Codecademy Ruby course. Got up to 87% today.