#=> "Social workers CAN code!!"

The story of how a social worker starts programming

At the start of Summer 2014, I decided to build my professional skillset and learn some programming. My partner of 9 years has been a programmer for about 5 of those, and so many people in our social circle also happen to be programmers. Currently, I’m at a professional crossroads, and I am choosing programming as the path that will allow me to simultaneously be creative in my work, connect with other creative and passionate people, and make positive contributions to the people and organizations I encounter - and maybe even the whole world! That said, social work is more than a job I had for several years - it is part of my identity and I think I will be able to apply some of my favorite things about social work to programming. Social work is about using a systems approach to support the person (or group or community, etc.) in front of you in achieving the goals they have set out for themselves. From being a "sponge" listener (before starting to program myself) in many dinner conversations with my partner and our friends, I already knew systems theory applies to computer programming. Of course - websites, web applications, databases, etc. - are all systems. Existing within and interacting with other systems. I love it already!
So I will be using this blog to document my learning, and from time to time I'll reflect on how my new learning as a programmer is fitting in (or not) with what I know as a social worker. After this first post, the blog will be mostly technical, with an appropriate amount of narrative reflection (I'm still a social worker!!).

A timeline of my coding journey so far:

• Summer 2014: I found codecademy.com after being blessed in disguise (the grant that was funding my nonprofit social worky job ended). I began working on the HTML and CSS, and I was way more excited this time around. But when I decided to mix it up and learn some JavaScript in the middle of the HTML and CSS tutorials, I started to see how fun coding could be!
• August 2014: Liking programming more and more, going to some meetups (queens_JS, NYC HTML5, NYC on Rails), and greeting my partner when he came home from work by saying, "Hi! How's your day? I have [x] [y] [z] questions about what I learned today." I already knew he was a great partner, and now I found out he was also a very patient, informative, and attentive tutor, as well!
• End of August - early September 2014: Applied to Flatiron School!!!
• September 2014: Wait in agony. Do the Flatiron prework. Mind blown by the command line - this has taken a lot of practice to get used to. Pretty confused by git, but I think it's coming together.

...and at this point, I'm diving into Ruby. I've been getting into the control-flow, practicing loops and iterators, and building hashes. And that brings us to THIS VERY MOMENT (literally, I'm switching windows between blog-writing and Ruby codecademy-ing).

I've just been introduced to one-line if and unless statements, and am now meeting ternary conditional statements. It is helpful how codecademy builds up by spelling things out with longer, wordier versions of code, and then says, "hey, by the way, there's actually a simpler way to do this."

I am off to keep learning Ruby, but I leave you with this, the very first ternary conditional statement that I just wrote:

soc_wrkrs_can_code = true
puts soc_wrkrs_can_code ? "Social workers CAN code!!": "You need to check your boolean. "