Well the timeline isn’t strictly “true”, but I had to get your attention. Let me contextualize you first. I was at my last year of highschool in Mexico City and a couple of years before I had started to discover the internet’s good stuff that I now love: awesome Youtube channels, TED, well executed google search, and MOOC.

Although, in respect to MOOC, I first discovered things like edX.org, iTunes U, and the MIT Open Courseware, the first MOOC site that really caught my attention was Udacity along with its Computer Science 101, a Python introduction.

Since then I rapidly became aware of the great amount of information available for free online, I realized that I could get the equivalent knowledge from a Computer Science degree with online courses.

Ruby & Rails (Part one)

This part is previous to the 6 months in the title so you can skip it if you are not interested.

In case you are not aware of it Ruby ON Rails (RoR) is a web development framework; in essence, it is a set of tools for building robust websites with working databases, users and other interesting features. Ruby is of course the programming language in which this set of tools is written (built upon).

I started to learn Ruby and Ruby on Rails and taking CS (computer science) more seriously because there was a vacancy for a RoR developer in a company I had worked for before and I wanted the job; here in Mexico there’s very little supply for RoR developers so I decided to go for it.

Initially I had no idea of what “the fancy kind of website you can build with rails” (read: Web App) was; as far as I could tell, an application was something you could download to your smartphone, in fact I thought there was a realtion between APPle (the brand) and APP (the computer concept).

You may get a glance of the problem I got myself into. I started by learning, wisely I’d say, ruby through tryruby.org and through a simple tutorial online I found through the ruby lang site. Two or three days later, after I “learned” ruby I followed by taking a look at some rails tutorials, so I decided to go tackle the Michael Hartl’s Rails Tutorial online.

Regretably I begun to develop Rails on a Windows machine (do not ever attempt to o it please) and it was a total headache ever since the installation. Considering I was a complete noob, that rails installer didn’t work quite well, and of course the fact that I was on windows, it was an epic task and I have no idea how I came to be so stubborn. Finally with almost no idea of what I was doing and probably through copying and pasting I gave up the rails tutorial… for the first time.

Code Cademy and The Beginning of my CS Carreer

This is where the “nothing” starts turning into “something”, when I came to this point in my life I had already written some ridiculous python scripts and had some experience with ruby, through beginner excercises, and Rails, having had no real understanding of it although I already knew there were different kinds of apps.

I really started to get into CS when I came to Code Cademy for the first time; here is where the 6 month count starts. I had a friend at school who kind of studies computer science as well and he started to learn javascript in Code Cademy during classes. Since I found highscool no intersting nor challenging I realized that I could very well spend my time differently, so I proceeded to use Code Cademy in school; starting with the Ruby course so I could remember my long unattended skills.

Once I finished Ruby course I decided to go for the HTML one, I found potential in web development and thought it would be piece of cake. I rapidly became interested in web development and realized that I could easily make lots of money with it. I learned html, css and javascript in Code Cademy and developed my first site: Elvira CCC.

Parallel to Code Cademy I studied a lot from sources like w3 schools, which isn’t very much recommended but gave me what I needed (I do recommend it) a habit that got me to a much better understanding of how the web works. A year before I had no idea of what a domain nor a server is so I had to do lots of research.

Finally I became interested in different preprocessors like Haml and Sass, web frameworks like twitter bootstrap opened me a world of design possibilities; in the end I met Zurb Foundation my favorite framework for things like its flexibility, modern aproach and its love for RoR and Sass.

Dodecaedro, My First Professional Site

As usual a friend was involved, this time his name was Said. Said simply loved movies and knew a lot about them. About the time I was finishing my Code Cademy courses we talked about a project he had with a friend of his. The project consisted in making short films and uploading them to the internet; since they wanted to make a living as movie directors, it was a good start.

When Said told me about this I inmmediatley volunteered for making his official web page and blog, but I had a lot to learn yet and time passed. Eventually I realized that a place for amateur artists to communicate their creations with the general public was necessary. Dodecaedro turned into a place for culture in fields like writing, photography, music and movies of course.

In Mexico we lack an eductation for art appreciation, let alone national arts; people just don’t care enough, and consequently it’s very difficult for underground artists to reach the general public. All of this makes Dodecaedro an awesome challenge and a very sustainable community driven project. I commited myself to the project beacause, as I always say to the team “Art increases the quality of living”.

Initially I tried Ruby on Rails for the project hoping to host it on Heroku or Amazon. I turned myself to the Michael Hartl tutorial again, but still found upon a very steep learning curve ahead. I decided to turn for a more straight forward solution and followed with Comfortable Mexican Sofa (driven by nationalism, ironically) a ruby gem content management system, but once the site was ready I just couldn’t upload it to heroku.

A month before, trying to find cheap hosting I met foundation, github pages and jekyll. After my two disastrous attempts I needed to find an easier solution so I decided to give jekyll a shot. Nothing could be much friendlier, I made my partials in HTML/CSS whith the help of foundation and in a matter of four days worth of work the Dodecaedro site was working.

Finally I had my first project for the community: a professional site with free hosting in Github Pages, a 50 cent domain for the first year, and a team of artists.

I later faced some issues you can read about here

First update: 10-05-2015
Second update: 24-09-2015
Third update and release: 25-09-2015