Archonic

Developers and designers in Ottawa have the blessing of an active and social community with a number of supporting companies. These are great opportunities to network, hear about job openings, learn more about your trade and get free pizza and red bull while you’re at it.

Windows often sucks for building things. Sublime Text 2 with package manager however, is the bee’s knees and makes simple build processing a breeze (no rhyme intended). No manually installing node and associated less building packages or mucking about with what directory you installed things. Just hit ctrl + b and be done with it. This also works for any other OS.

A professionals workflow is critical to their productivity. It takes years to arrive at the current choice set and will adapt with the release of new tools or the move to a different language or platform.

Sublime Text 2 has won the love of the developing community, and most certainly deserves. it. Multiple cursors, package control management, hundreds of high quality plugins and perhaps most important – it’s blazing fast. What’s more, is that when you change platforms or frameworks, all you have to do is install the appropriate packages and adjust your settings. As with nearly any task in sublime text, this takes literally just seconds.

I’ve heard both sides of the spectrum – Ruby is easy and Ruby is hard. The official word, from The Book of Ruby, is that Ruby has a deceptively easy “English language” type syntax but at the same time, the language is full of pitfalls just waiting to swallow a new comer.

There’s a number of great resources for both new programmers and veterans, but regardless I’d suggest starting at RubyMonk.com.

You’ve heard of the W3Consortium. You may even love them! In your quest to become more immediately hire-able, you stumble across W3Schools certification courses. Seems like a good idea? It’s not.

It turns out that the W3C is not affiliated with W3Schools at all. No serious employers take W3School certification seriously and it may even be a mark against you for giving into the misinformation. W3Schools also keeps out of date information published, and in some cases publishes information that was never true. W3Fools informs you to it all.