Study Tips from the Road

April 29, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

Hi there! I haven’t blogged here in a while, so I thought I’d give a quick update on how my program is going. I’ve made decent progress in the month since my last update.

All told, here’s what’s left. Basically I have three major project/assessments and AngularJS left.

* Rails: 1 lab & 1 final project
* JS: 5 labs
* Rails + JS: 3 labs & 1 final project building on top of the Rails final project
* AngularJS: 55 lessons/labs left & 1 final project

Of course I always wish that I were further along, but I think that I can definitely see the end 😀 . And considering that I was traveling for half of April, it’s not too shabby! Having the flexibility to travel was one of the reasons that I chose to study with an online program, although I admit that I had my doubts about actually getting anything done on the road.

Here’s what’s helped me stay on track with studying while visiting New York, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles:

* In general, have everything you need to work ready to go in your bag: for me, that’s my computer, music/headphones, coffee mug, notebook and my cellphone to use as a hotspot. Having those things on me at all times made it easy to bang out a couple of labs during travel downtime.
* It’s worth the space to pack your best headphones. My Sony MDR-7506 over ear headphones are large, and take up precious real estate in my backpack, but packing them was a great choice. I was able to block out lots of the annoying sounds of travel (babies, airplane hums, sorority girl banter…). Invaluable. Also, I don’t know exactly when this happened, but I guess since I wear them so much when I’m coding, putting the headphones on puts me in the mood to work. Pavlovian response I suppose.
* Study what you can in the hotel, but try to get out and about. Look for unusual spots to study: bars, park benches, train stations, Shake Shack 🙂 . Work that hotspot, or pre-load relevant content onto your phone before you head out (podcasts, videos, books).
* In New York I made it a point to stop by and study in my bootcamp’s physical location. It was something akin to visiting the motherland, LOL. Very inspiring and definitely motivation for me to work harder.

* Try not to feel too guilty about balancing fun / studying. If possible, pre-plan your hours for working vs. touristing. I tried to spend the morning and late evening studying, which became my “routine” after a couple of days.

I don’t have any more trips planned until a wedding in late May, so hopefully the next time that I post I’ll be sharing my Rails app. Just gotta commit to a project idea first…

Meetups: Code for San Francisco

April 1, 2016April 1, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

Event: Weekly Civic Hack Night

Interested in helping San Francisco? You have found the right place! Join neighbors, government employees, designers, coders, students and more! Our weekly hack night is focused on civic tech and making government services better in San Francisco. We hack/build and learn together every Wednesday evening.

Schedule

6:00pm doors open, socialize and eat dinner

6:30pm welcome remarks, (often) a presentation, and project pitches

7:00pm start hacking or stay for new member orientation

8:00pm more hacking

9:00pm keep on hacking

10:00pm doors close and lights out

Group: Code for San Francisco

All you need is your brain, your passion, and your openness when you come to Code for San Francisco’s weekly Hack Night. We welcome all interested people, including residents, activitsts, business folk, designers, and developers. No need for tech experience of any kind!

Code for San Francisco is a Code for America “brigade” or local chapter focused on improving San Francisco. You’ll be surrounded by folks who are interested in working together to change The City for the better. We fix government services, create insightful visualizations from opened data, and engage people who may have been excluded from the economic boom in the Bay Area. Come by to join an existing project (we need ALL types of skills – not just coders), to pitch your own project, or simply to experience the global movement to change the areas in which we live for the better.

Location: Code for America

Experience: I’m pretty introverted, so it takes a lot of energy and hyping myself up in order to get me to attend a meetup, even if I’m going with a friend. One of the hardest things for me is the fact that 99% of the people who I meet at these events… I will never see them again, ever. It’s just fact. I can think of one time that I saw a meetup person again, and that was because I contacted her about a class I was taking.

This Code for San Francisco hack night has a few really great things going for it. First off, this event happens often enough (every Wednesday) that there are “regulars.” But even better, the people there are bonded by a common goal – making San Francisco better by using their skills. There’s a pretty diverse set of projects to choose from, and you are also encouraged to pitch your own ideas. So you’re actually doing/creating something, not just drinking and talking at a “networking” event.

The vibe was very inclusive, and contrary to the name of the organization, no you don’t have to know how to code in order to come and participate. You can be a designer, or a PR person, or an event planner. You just have to care. <— (I suppose that this might actually disqualify quite a few people) Dinner was available and the beer was free-flowing so it all felt very casual. Turnout was good, with about ~50 people?

The night that I visited with my roommate, there was a special guest from Microsoft who gave a talk on privacy. Her passion on the subject matter came through and it ended up being a surprisingly engaging presentation.

Verdict:

After our new member orientation, we were encouraged to check out their website and find a project to join. I’m not sure which to choose, but I’m definitely going to go back to this event. It was a really positive experience.

Hump Day

March 30, 2016March 30, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

I’m having a hard time concentrating today, so I thought that I’d take a break to assess where I am in my program. Honestly, I can’t believe that it’s the end of March! As I mentioned earlier this month, I was hounded by this feeling of being “behind”, due to basically taking January off to earn some $$$. Totally reasonable, but I just couldn’t shake it.

March in Review

Anyways, I busted ass in March, upping my study time to ~55 hrs/wk from ~40 hrs/wk in February. I finished 2 unit final projects that I’d been putting off forever, and scheduled my assessments for them. I’m going to meetups of some sort every week, so that’s getting easier.

I’m itching to contribute to “real world” projects, so around the middle of the month when I found an open source software internship program for minorities, I really wanted to apply. However, when push came to shove, I didn’t pull my application together fast enough for that round of selection. It was a long shot, as I found out about the program 5 days before the deadline. Besides putting together my app for the next round, I’m exploring other options to contribute. Code for America’s San Francisco chapter has a few interesting projects along with a weekly hack night, and Up for Grabs looks like a cool site for finding open source projects that need help.

New Computerrrrr!!!!

I’d been holding out on buying a new computer until the next Macbook Pro release, but there were no computers announced at the March Apple event. Bummer! But I took that as a sign to finally bite the bullet and get my first new computer since… 2009? It’s awesome. I’m a week in and so far I love developing on a Mac. I should have done this months ago!

Rails & the Rest…

Anyways, what else… I’m finally in the promised land…. RAILS.

First off…

Hallelujah!!!

Secondly….

It is kicking my ass. Rails is vast. Rails is powerful. Rails has so many amazing features, you just gotta know the magic words. As I’m plodding through, I feel like I’m being inducted into Hogwarts or something. WHAT IS THIS BLACK MAGIC RAILS???

The Finish Line

For a while in my program, there was a bit of a running joke about “never finishing” because it felt like every day they were adding more and more lessons to the final section. However it looks like they’ve finalized the curriculum! So now I know where the end is. Here’s how I stand today:::

Rails 53/102 lessons w/final project
JavaScript 46/55 lessons (close!!)
Rails and JavaScript 13/46 lessons w/final project
Angular JS 7/111 lessons w/final project

So close, yet SO FAR… I don’t think finishing off JavaScript/Rails stuff will be too troublesome, but I’m honestly nervous about Angular based on what I’ve heard from classmates.

Oh well, time to get back to work.

Meetups: SF Rails / Ruby

March 23, 2016March 26, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

Event: [SFRails/ Ruby] Rails Performance Optimization, Bundler, + Internationalization

Agenda

6:30 Networking | Food | Drink

7:00 Sharing of Tips and Tools

7:15 Speakers

Talk 1: Rails Performance Optimization
Learn advanced Rails performance optimization tricks, techniques, and processes from the author of the Ruby Performance Optimization book recently published by the Pragmatic Bookshelf.

We’ll talk about what exactly makes Ruby and Rails slow, and ways to fix it by optimizing memory usage first and CPU usage next. We’ll also talk how to make ActiveRecord faster, how to take advantage of your database, and how recent changes in Ruby itself affect Rails performance.

At the Q/A session after the presentation you’ll have a chance to ask your question about Rails performance.

Talk 2: “How Does Bundler Work, Anyway?”

We all use Bundler at some point, and most of us use it every day. But what does it do, exactly? Why do we have to use bundle exec? What’s the point of checking in the Gemfile.lock? Why can’t we just gem install the gems we need? Join me for a walk through the reasons that Bundler exists, and a guide to what actually happens when you use it. Finally, we’ll cover some Bundler “pro tips” that can improve your workflow when developing on multiple applications at once.

Talk 3: Going Global: How to internationalize a Rails App

Localization is key to providing a great user experience for global customers. The rigorous localization efforts by companies like Facebook, Airbnb and Google yielded compelling results both in terms of growth as well as customer appeal. Luckily Rails comes with great internationalization support which makes it easy to start even for any size of app and stage of business. However, localization does not stop with the pure translation of interfaces and contents, but often has further application design as well as technical marketing implications.

8:30 End

Group: SF Rails / SF Ruby

Location: Lumosity

NPR API CLI gem – OO Assessment

March 21, 2016August 27, 2016 - Tracy Leave a comment

In my program each major unit ends with a few projects. There are a couple of projects that just feel like really long labs, and then there is a final project that is a bit more open-ended (AKA fun). After you’ve finished your project, you’re required to film a video walkthrough, write a blog post about the experience, and lastly you have an assessment with a Flatiron instructor.

For the object-oriented Ruby section, they asked us to create a CLI gem that scraped data from a webpage or via an API. Despite having a little experience with web scraping and APIs in Python, it still took me a while to get my head around the best way to approach the project.

Specific Project Requirements:

* Package as a Ruby gem
* Provide a CLI on gem installation.
* CLI must provide data from an external source, whether scraped or via a public API.
* Data provided must go at least a level deep, generally by showing the user a list of available data and then being able to drill into a specific item.

My Gem Overview / Walkthrough

I built a gem that connects to the NPR API. Through the command line you can pick an NPR radio program and see its recent stories, then drill into those stories to see further information. You can also choose to read the whole story through the browser.

The interface looks like this:

Here is the video walkthrough of my gem: