I’ve just finished my first month of the three-month SkillCrush Ruby on Rails blueprint. That means that I’ve just finished learning the rudiments of Ruby and Git—next month we’ll move on to simple Ruby web frameworks, before rounding out month three with an immersion into Ruby on Rails.

As my capstone project for this first month, I’ve written code that asks you for your zip code, and—using the Yahoo Weatherman gem—tells you the weather conditions, high, and low for the next five days. It’s not the most exciting app in the world (what learning-to-code project is?), but it’s more code—and specifically more Ruby—than I would have ever thought I could write this time last year.

Check out the weather forecast script on Github.

An interesting note about SkillCrush: I first heard about them from Caro Griffin—she’s their community manager, and an all-around rad person. We met at BullCon 2014, a conference for ambitious women.

Without going to the conference and meeting Caro, I wouldn’t have been aware of SkillCrush, which means I wouldn’t be in the course, which means I almost certainly would still be paralyzed with fear about writing anything more than ultra-hacky Python. I highly recommend the Bullish conference to anyone who considers themselves even remotely an ambitious woman. The people you meet there are unparalleled.