Well, for something a little different, I decided to write my opinion of a free video course. Since I’m writing my blog in markdown, I figured why not review it with something other than the Kramdown cheatsheet. Wes Bos has a number of video courses, some free and some paid for. His Mastering Markdown course is one of the free ones. It’s really only a single 23 minute video, so not much of a course, but since he just came out with a Learn Node course and has another longer free course of Javascript projects, I figured why not try the little course to get a feel for his teaching style and see if I want to invest any more time and/or money in more of his courses later. His other free courses if you’re interested include Command Line Power User which has some Z shell tips that I might check out, since I’m sure I’m not making the most of it, and JavaScript 30 which is 30 days of building 30 things in vanilla JS (which promises no frameworks, no compilers, no libraries, and no boilerplate). Unless this one is terribly, I’ll probably sit through the command line one after this. The JavaScript 30 one I’ll only invest time in if I like these two. Well, without further ado, here’s my opinion of Mastering Markdown. ...

So, what do I have to blog about? I’m always trying out new stuff and reading books, so I figure I’ll talk about that. I happen to have just gotten a beta copy of Agile Web Development with Rails 5.1 and since my Ruby and Rails experience from my résumé is a little rusty, I figure I’ll read that and blog about the experience. Starting this site using Jekyll has made me think about Ruby lately anyway. It’s been many years since I’ve read “Agile Web Development with Rails”, and I think it was the version that covered Rails 1.2, so this should be a pretty new experience for me; both a great refresher and an introduction to what is new in the Rails world these days. ...

Finally got around to putting something together for my github.io site other than what the generator spit out. I went ahead and took advantage of the fact that they let you layout your site with Jekyll to play with some “new to me” tech. I can write up the posts in Markdown, so maybe it will be easy enough that I actually start blogging here.