it's nice having had the web background in ruby on rails through the rails bridge outreach program. they're the people who first got me using git and github and heroic several years ago before I decided to focus and learn programming. I'm not a rails person but it's something I'd like to get under my belt.

I don't claim to know everything but i was able to get a rudimentary mongo db down with the tutorial's help

I learned how to push node.js out to heroku. When I first met substack and Sudoroom i was at a hackathon and working on a node.js learning app for kids. It was a cool hackathon and substack makes learning javascript and node.js fun while throwing in a lot of art. 

at that time I don't think heroku supported node.js so we were using nodejitsu. but now it does, which i learned

result 

so it doesn't look like much but i got to understand the inner workings of node.js

express.js

and the various frameworks. I'm not saying that it's healthy to dive into the frameworks first without knowing the language fundamentals (or relearning them after you've forgotten them) but I'm also actively reviewing stuff like inheritance, modeling objects in javascript and so on on the free access to the treehouse learning site that i get through my publicly funded san francisco library card. 

i wasn't able to understand hooking up the app to the free mongodb database on heroku. that probably isn't hard but  id din't want to spend the rest of the night looking around. it was nice and quick. 

i'm trying to focus but it's hard, so now i feel i've gotten past my very superficial reviews of node.js 

now I'm around a lot of really talented people who do a lot of work in node.js so I can ask around, and I'm capable enough now (I hope) to do a lot of self-learning and not have to be dependent on too much coursework or even a book. 

one of the hardest things to deal with is how quickly the languages and frameworks update.

i'm primarily a mobile phone developers who's self taught but i'd like to do more web stuff and back end work, since I enjoy the speed that comes with web development. it takes a little longer to do UI on the mobile phone, and although UI is important it's a different nature and not as vital on a website. (someone will probably argue with me)

so although this looks pathetic: it was nice

nice because I was around a lot of javascript people, I got over my fear of node.js and javascript, and i'm on my way to making small web node.js hacks that are useful for different things <3