Turning Melissa Into A Programmer.
My wife who was a practicing dentist when we married has been a long way from her chosen profession. By the time our third child is ready to go to school part time, it will have been 10 years since she practiced dentistry. We've been talking lately about her getting involved in programming. She has the mindfor it. She graduated valedictorian from her high school and with honors at the school of dentistry. She's even helped me out while I was talking my masters degree. Melissa wrote up the requirements for a Dental Management System that myself and a few others built for a project management course we were taking.
Anyway, I've come up with an outline of how we will start converting her into a programmer. The language of choice will be Ruby on Rails but she'll have to learn data modeling, MySQl, HTML, CSS, vi, Xitami, Gimp, Joomla, etc as ancillary skills. We'll probably package all this up so we can train my nephew. Maybe one day, we'll have a Philippine Outsourcing Business for programmers.
Stay tuned. Melissa is more determined than I am and a finisher. I look forward to seeing what she can do.
Motivations:
1. A nephew (Melissa's sisters first born) nearing college age who wants to follow in my footsteps.
2. Have some projects we can work on together like a business system for my mom's Day Spa.
The Plan:Turning Melissa Into A Programmer
Tasks
1. Read Joomla tutorial. http://www.netshinesoftware.com/downloads/Joomla%20Quick%20Start%201.0.pdf
2. Pick a Joomla Theme for My Mom's Spa Site (http://templates.joomlaya.com/)
3. Copy all the content from my mom's spa site. (www.spafloridian.com)
4. Create a Joomla version of my mom's spa site. http://spafloridian.textdriven.com (administrator admin / password vidtex1)
5. Install chosen theme.
6. Edit theme using HTML editors
7. Learn how to use Gimp2 for photo/picture editing.
8. Learn Ruby with me. We'll build an appointment application.
9. Create a data model.
10. Put services, employees, etc into data model.
11. Build a feature at a time using Ruby.
12. Read Ruby on Rails book.
13. Learn vi.
14. Learn html and cascading style sheets.
14. Learn Xitami (web server) basics.
15. Learn SDLC (software development life cycle).
16. Develop coursework for Marc using Moodle (www.moodle.org).
