Bons Mots

Rub it in, San Francisco

Mon, 20 May 2013 21:09:45 -0400

I hate checking the weather these days. I mean, really San Francisco, couldn’t you at least pretend you have days of bad weather?

Rude.

Minor Miracles

Sat, 18 May 2013 20:49:47 -0400

Week 3, day 4: Mary turns off the building alarm.

Making impressions

Sat, 11 May 2013 18:15:51 -0400

So it’s now been two weeks since I started my new job at Howcast. Boy, it’s been an eye-opening experience.

I remember my first day of DBC, thinking I was totally going to be ready for whatever they threw at me. I’d done the prep work, so I figured that meant I would be fine.

My first day at Howcast was a similar experience. To say I was overwhelmed is a bit of an understatement. I was prepared for lots of lines of Ruby code that I would have to sift through and tie together. I was not prepared for the abundant usage of outside libraries and gems. Every few lines had me opening up Google to figure out where the heck a specific command was coming from. It was daunting. I left work that day feeling more drained than I ever felt leaving DBC. All I did was go home and pass out.

So the next day I decided to get an early start and dive right back into code. I was the first person to arrive, but I had a key to the building. I unlocked the door, walked in, and heard a high pitched beeping.

Sooooo apparently the building had an alarm system that I had NO IDEA how to turn off. The high pitched beeping started escalating, much to my horror.

Eventually all hell broke loose and the alarm started doing that scaring howling-siren thing. I decided it would probably be best to just lock the door again and go downstairs to wait for the cops. I would just explain to them that I was the foolish noob that didn’t know about the alarm, and hope I didn’t get arrested.

Turns out the cops never came, but I refused to go near the door again. I waited outside on the stairs until the next employee came up and opened the door. I now know the alarm code, but I refuse to be the first person in the office. If the door is locked when I arrive, I just make a coffee run. I think everyone at Howcast thinks I’m retarded, but idgaf.

Anyway, two weeks in, and I’ve finally gotten better at the code base, and learned about a TON of new gems in the process. Now when I read through the code, it’s less Google and more:

It’s been really great, though. Because there are only two of us on the engineering team, and we’re in the midst of writing the new apps, I’ve actually been able to sit down and write a fair amount of code. It generally gets torn apart, and changed a fair amount, but it’s still nice to know that you’re contributing. And I wrote more tests in two days than I did in my entire time at DBC. It’s been crazy.

In other news, it would be really great if New York would quite acting like Florida. There’s been torrential rain and outrageous humidity here for the last week. I keep telling myself it’s New York’s way of making me feel welcome.

Silly Google

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 01:50:41 -0400

Magic, courtesy of Ruby on Rails

Thu, 14 Mar 2013 01:46:59 -0400

I was sort of getting amused by all of our references to “Rails Magic” today, and then I remembered that during phase 2, Jeffrey was adamant about making sure that everyone knew computers don’t do anything magical. My reaction:

But it’s still magic, and I really need to work on learning the proper incantations.

In other news, I really need to work on having a bit more confidence in my code, instead of constantly doubting myself. Every time my pair questions what I’m doing, my immediate reaction is to doubt everything and berate myself for being so foolish.

Today was great though, because I held my ground on writing some controller methods that wound up being surprisingly more helpful than even I had anticipated.

So basically, object oriented programming really is awesome, and once you start using it habitually, you’ll wind up with surprising, and awesome, results. <== that just made me feel like a spokeswoman (-__-)

Put, puts, and p

Fri, 08 Mar 2013 02:07:13 -0500

Today’s frustration: missing one character in my controller, and getting errors out the wazoo. Frig.

Note to self: NEVER use “puts” in the controller to test what you’re getting from the server. Missing that “s” can ruin your day. “P” it is!

Maybe when I'm done with thinking

Tue, 05 Mar 2013 00:49:51 -0500

I was mosey-ing around reddit yesterday and kept coming across those memes that feature the “scumbag” brain. My favorite was the one where you go to bed agonizing over how you have to wake up early, and wind up not sleeping for the entire night. I feel like I’ve been doing similar things, and barely sleeping enough.

It’s a vicious circle.

Today was amusing for me. I’m glad that the teachers at DBC have such high expectations for us, and call us out when we’re not pushing ourselves as far as we could be. Big thanks to Jeffrey for forcing my pair and I to write our code using object oriented javascript.

We definitely would have just powered through the problem and submitted crap code if it weren’t for Jeffrey’s prodding.

Working with the Twitter API today was a bit disorienting at first. I felt like I didn’t quite know where to start, and wound up looking through all the documentation, seeking enlightenment. It went something like this:

What I thought was going to be a hellish assignment wound up being quite fun. Still need to work a bit more on my ajax techniques, though. I feel like I psych myself out and overcomplicate things. My goal lately has been to act like ajax and I are best friends; I’m hoping I can fool myself into thinking it’s super-mega-uber-fun. Thus far, though, I wind up just laughing at myself. But really, ajax is awesome d=(´▽｀)=b

God help the keyboards φ(^∇^ )

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 02:34:58 -0500

I find myself genuinely upset at the loss of another Sea Lion. When a fellow boot announced they were leaving the program today, I felt an intense sinking feeling. I hate that people who give up so much to be here, and put in 100% effort every day, still don’t make it through. I could see the effect on everyone’s face, including the teachers. It was rough. I can only say that I have the utmost respect to anyone who can step back and make such a decision.

People deciding to leave really solidifies the fact that this learning environment is not ideal for everyone. The pace is grueling. (✖╭╮✖)

I was highly amused by the afternoon lecture today. The Truth went through everything so quickly, it was a little disorienting. I felt like the majority of us wound up staring blankly at him…

As a fellow boot so sagely voiced when we were prompted for questions, “Where do I even start?”

On the bright side, I’m starting to feel a lot better about JS and ajax. Working through the JS Racer challenge today really helped me focus in on all the things I’ve been struggling with for the past few days… and it allowed for the fun use of fade ins and outs

I was really excited about the prospect of a fourth phase to DBC, focusing in on more front end. Being a TA is a little worrisome for me, since I seriously question my ability to teach others. I think it has something to do with the fact that when I explain things to people, I have a mental picture of what I’m talking about, and for some reason I’m always perturbed when others don’t share that mental image.

Eh, I’ll just have to work on it.

I’m hoping for the sake of all the keyboards at DBC, as well as my fingers, that we are starting to head towards the tail end of the JS Racer apps. I’m really way too competitive, even when it comes to a tiny little racing game.

Pulling it together (⊙_◎)

Tue, 26 Feb 2013 01:35:00 -0500

After an entire week of illness, I’m finally starting to feel human again. I feel like it’s so easy to let yourself get run down here, especially through lack of sleep. I’m really working on staying on top of my sleeping habits, but it’s so hard leaving early from DBC (if 9p counts as early…)

This morning was an exciting mix of rainbow buttons and jokes. It was the making of such a great day…until ajax came along…

Not even close to an exaggeration. I thought ajax and I had become friends after the group project. We had so many “AHA!” moments together. I feel like a jilted ex. Why, ajax? Why?!

All I have to say is kudos to Matthew for putting up with me towards the end of the day, because I was really starting to lose my cool. When a prospective teacher, who shall forever be known to us as The Truth, came up and in 5 minutes fixed a problem we had been struggling with for over an hour, I think my brain just hit shut down.

You know it’s time to go home when you start missing the obvious.

In other news, we learned how to create a gradient in CSS today:

Soooooooooooo beautiful…

Still reeling a bit after realizing that it’s already week 5 of DBC. Where is the time going?

My day, in gifs

Sat, 16 Feb 2013 00:33:27 -0500

Because there’s no better way to explain the emotional roller coaster that was this day…

7 am; getting to DevBootcamp:

8 am; waiting for the news on how the day was going to pan out:

10 am; working on the group project and having things go well:

10:45 am; starting the assessment:

11:30 am; when Shadi came over and told me my time was up:

11:45 am; when I walked away from the assesment:

12:30 pm; finishing the first part of the group project:

2 pm; finding out there was going to be another round of interviews for some people, and having Anne suddenly walk up and stand next to me:

4 pm; getting the email saying I was moving on to the next phase:

4:30 pm; hearing that 2 fellow boots weren’t continuing on:

5:30 pm; saying goodbye:

6:30 pm; “celebrating” the end of another week:

It’s funny how in a mere 3 weeks people can come to mean so much to you.

On to phase 2, Sea Lions!

SQL o( ><)o

Tue, 12 Feb 2013 01:02:27 -0500

Had to fight off a surge of panic this morning when I opened up Socrates and saw 10 core challenges today.

Luckily, it panned out much better than I expected. Finished a bit early and was able to start finishing up on a few of the cores I still had left from last week.

Principles of Object Oriented Design (in review)

Separation of concerns

Inheritance

Composition

Single responsibility principle

Reducing dependencies

Law of Demeter and loosely coupled objects

Variable scoping (global, local, instance, and class)

Object privacy (public, private, protected)

Proper use of accessors

I definitely got a huge kick out of the SQL tutor crashing because people were using the WHERE method instead of the JOIN method. On that note, still waiting for my prize…

TIL:

1. Relational Database terms

Primary key (id): a way of uniquely identifying a record

Record: a row in a database table

Field: a column in a database table

Foreign keys: allow access to other database tables; map back to something unique, but do not have to be unique within the table where they are being referenced

2. In databases, the table name should be plural, and the field names should be singular.

3. There are 3 kinds of relationships between tables in the database:

- one to one

- one to many

- many to many

4. There should only be one way to infer information from a database. Being able to make multiple inferences indicates a problem in your logic.

Week 3, and still alive!

General atmosphere at DBC as a new week begins and we’re all still around:

Sea Lions! Huzzah!

(-__-)zzzzzz

Sat, 09 Feb 2013 02:43:00 -0500

TIL (group project day!!!):

1. object.send(arg.to_sym) <== invokes the method identified by the symbol

2. object.respond_to?(method) <== returns a true or false for if the object can respond to the given method

3. There are three phases in a group oriented environment:

Norming:

Storming:

Performing:

It’s been quite a week, and now I think I might finally sleep a little (^__^)

Also, shout out to the DBC Chicago staff for being so amazing this week with helping us. You guys are awesome!!

Something, something, dependency injection...

Fri, 08 Feb 2013 01:37:00 -0500

After wasting a significant amount of time hunting around on my laptop to find a way to save a .txt file, a fellow boot comes along and informs me that Sublime can do that…

TIL:

1. See above

2. Things to do when coding:

Separate the concerns: separate the input from the primary concern of the method when using the ARGV

Loosely coupled objects: decouple objects and methods so they aren’t tied into a particular data structure

Single responsibility principle: don’t do megamoth, or have the God object—something that is everywhere in your code and holds many responsibilities. This is a bad thing, because it affects everything in your code, making your code hard to change.

Minimize context

Follow the Law of Demeter

3. We should consider compiling a “toolbox,” or list of helpful Ruby methods that may help us in the future.

4. Errors are cool, and helpful… to Jesse.

Jesse, when he gets an error message:

Me, when I get an error message:

5. It’s helpful to always define a clear entry point for your code (typically your driver code)

They call it ... OOD?

Thu, 07 Feb 2013 02:37:27 -0500

I spent most of the day imagining oods, thanks to one of my accountability buddies referring to object oriented design as OOD.

AnyWHO… (^__^)

TIL:

1. You can call a method on an “end”

(•_•) sentence.split(’ ’).map do |word|

( •_•)>⌐■-■ pig_latin_word(word)

(⌐■_■) end.join(’ ’)

2. alt + k ==> ˚ (aka the degree symbol)

3. Calling .any? on an object will return true if anything is true for the block passed. Calling .all? will only return true is everything is true for the block passed.

4. Don’t put a * in the command line, unless you surround it by quotes (“*”)

Onward with the OOD!!!

My driver code is my friend

Wed, 06 Feb 2013 03:12:01 -0500

TIL:

1. Driver code is your friend. Writing it before you code can be a huge help with determining how you want your program to work. Driver code first; program second.

2. Smurf naming condition: redundant naming scheme.

3. Megamoth: maga-monolithic methods; aka ridiculously huge methods.

4. Law of demeter (don’t call a method on a method)

5. Never print to the screen from the class.

6. When defining methods, it’s better to tell an object to do something to itself, rather than try to go around and do something for the object.

Not good code:

def check_for_overheating(system_monitor)

if system_monitor.temperature > 100

system_monitor.sound_alarms

end

Better code:

class SystemMonitor

def check_for_overheating

if temperature > 100

sound_alarms

end

7. I need to get a notebook, because taking notes on my computer is a pain.

Thought of this today when the morning lecture got held up due to Wifi issues: TIL: 1. Everything...

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 01:33:00 -0500

Thought of this today when the morning lecture got held up due to Wifi issues:

TIL:

1. Everything in Ruby is an object.

2. A quality of good code is the ability to respond to future changes.

3. I am a lego maker, not a lego user.

4. Object oriented design is noun central, and much easier to adapt to new requirements than procedural design, which is verb central.

5. What takes me 11 hours to complete takes Shereef 11 minutes.

(╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻

Really enjoyed today’s exercises, particularly the one about oranges :)

One week down, 8 to go!

Sun, 03 Feb 2013 21:40:44 -0500

Woooooooo! What a week.

I think the main thing I learned this week, besides that regular expressions are like magic, is that you learn a whole heck of a lot in DevBootcamp without even realizing it.

I also learned that sometimes your code is so far from DRY that you can’t help but put a disclaimer in one of your exercises on the week end assessment. I will just keep telling myself that at least the thing worked in the end, otherwise I may fall over in shame. Once again, my apologies to whoever gets stuck going through my assessment. Exercise 5 was doozy.

My goal for next week: update my blog a bit more often.

Cheers!