Progress: Moving the needle, sometimes by millimeters, other times by centimeters

Let's talk about progress. The inspiration came from revisiting my first blog post and realizing I needed to update my learning-to-code timeline. Also, I watched this video yesterday:

Maybe it was the "this-is-moving-and-important" music in the background or the earnest tone that made me pay attention. But really, it was just something I needed to hear from an objective source: "Be insatiable...just move the needle in even the smallest way, every day...you are gonna look back and see mountains of movement behind you."Thank you, DevTips!

So let's talk about my progress. Since my first post, I have gotten through a lot more of the Flatiron prework. I have completed the Ruby Codecademy track and the Treehouse Ruby Foundations. I'm still reading Chris Pine's "Learn to Program"....while I learn about Rails. Oh, and I also had an interview for the Flatiron School! I'd ask you to wish me luck, but I'm not going to leave it up to luck. Instead, I'm going to get more insatiable and keep pushing the progress needle. But you can still wish me luck if you want to. I'm not one to turn down a kind word. :-)

Back to progress since the first post. I've been blogging! To you, my blog reader (thanks!), this is obvious, but it is important progress to note. In the first post, I said this would be a technical blog...and it will be. But I'm still learning how to write technically (by reading about it), so stay tuned for more technical content. It's coming, I promise. The needle WILL advance further....hey, look at the next paragraph!!

On top of these things, I have been taking a Girl Develop It Intro to Javascript and jQuery class. Last night was the 3rd of 4 classes. We started class talking about how to interact with the DOM and using the getElementById and get/setAttribute methods. Then we got to the intro to jQuery part and learned the jQuery way to do that. Last night's in-class exercises had us using event handlers and we left off with homework to use JS and jQuery to make a form. Once I submit this blog, I'll be revisiting all of last night's exercises to get some more clarity and depth about these things.

Oh, and one last note on my progress. I edited my first blog post today after I noticed that part of the text had a background-color of white. Not sure how/when that happened - how did I not see it when it was originally published?! I confess I was just using Blogger's WYSIWYG interface with a little bit of html tweaking originally. But I have atoned. First, I checked the HTML for the first post. So many span tags!! The same weird span tags repeated multiple times in one element. Why so many span tags, WYSIWYG, why?!? So I got all of those out of there and fixed some other things and THEN I wrote this post not only directly as HTML, but even in a text editor. Much better!

I'm off to do some event handling. Who knows? Maybe one day all these millimeters and centimeters of progress will add up to many meters, many kilometers of progress!! For the next post, I'll talk about my experience as a newbie going to tech meetups (mostly QueensJS, NYCHTML5, and NYC on Rails) and how that is advancing my progress. In the comments, tell me about progress you've made recently and what keeps you insatiable for more.