Hackbright on Nyghtowl

Sun Finder – Where is it now?

Sun, 09 Jun 2013 08:52:20 +0000

For those following along, I have made very little progress on my Sun Finder application since Career Day about a month ago. Since hindsight is 20/20, I probably could have seen this coming, but I was living in a blissful imaginary world that said: “There will be all this time after I graduate to do all these things”. The reality is that all that time was about to be commandeered by interviews, practice & studying for interview and a bunch of life stuff that you can never plan for.

Week 10 – Graduation!

Tue, 14 May 2013 21:37:25 +0000

In the true spirit of graduation, I am posting this late and after the fact. I can’t believe 10 weeks have come and gone. I know I’m also not fully feeling it yet since most of us have transitioned into the post graduation job search.

May 10th on week 10 was our official graduation day. Although, it felt like we started celebrating graduation after Career Day, and didn’t let up until that weekend. Right after Career Day, most of us went out to let our hair down and celebrate a pretty amazing accomplishment.

HB Quick Tips

Sat, 11 May 2013 20:20:21 +0000

Below are some quick tips for those considering something like Hackbright Academy. If you have time before or want to get some preliminary building blocks, check out the links and pointers below.

Keyboard Shortcuts:

Learn keyboard short cuts (before starting any programming bootcamp)
If you are not used to it, it does suck royally to learn
Push through it and practice, practice, practice!
The less you use the mouse, the more credible you are as a developer

Ask for Help Early and Often:

Leverage your classmates
Leverage google, stackoverflow, reddit, etc…
Leverage your network and online social tools

Start Reviewing:

Check-out HTML, CSS & JavaScript

Git with Git:

Read about git
Read about GitHub
Want more?…
Load git on your home computer
Setup a GitHub account

Balance is Key:

As Cynthia would say “take breaks!”
Make sure to keep up a workout regime – its good for the brain
Eat healthy to keep the energy up

Check out Zach Holman’s deck (it’s 5 min)

Career Day – Done & Done

Sat, 11 May 2013 01:19:19 +0000

As promised, I’m taking a moment to post commentary regarding Career Day. It went fast, was a whirlwind of companies and was a relief when it was done.

How it Worked:

Career Day is when Hackbright partner companies meet with students individually and see our skills on display through our final project. It was literally interview speed dating. Each student had a table and every 7 minutes the companies would rotate between the tables. It was a brief time to get a sense on whether there was enough fit for a further conversation/interview.

Week 9 – Crunch Time

Sat, 04 May 2013 17:52:45 +0000

It is hard to stop long enough to write this. Sometimes this past week I was too excited to work on my project to sleep. Still I know this is valuable for my sanity to think through what I’ve done so far and appreciate how far I’ve come. Plus, my brain functions better when I take breaks from coding.

Looking at my post from even a week ago surprises me because it feels like longer than 2 weeks since I was figuring out how to use web APIs for example. At the time it made me feel very lost and the concept seemed extremely foreign. Now whenever I see there’s an API that can be used, it feels like it’s the easiest thing to implement and leverage.

Week 8 – Time Goes Fast When You’re Having Fun (Project Status)

Sun, 28 Apr 2013 21:03:04 +0000

To anyone out there who’s watching, I wrapped up week 8 and I’m thinking about how I want to leverage my time in week 9 in preparation for Career Day. I do talk a lot about that as the D day, and it is to some extent. It’s a goal to help keep focus in terms of how I want to prioritize my time. A second goal is that I only have technically 2 weeks left in the program and there are certain subjects I want to practice while I have class time. Sometimes those goals match in purpose and sometimes I have to just pick based on how I’m feeling that day.

Week 7 – SF Sun Finder Project Progress

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 15:46:00 +0000

Development progress has definitely been enlightening the last week and a half. I’ve summarized highlights that have taken place to show what I’ve gone through so far and an example path of developing a HB project.

At the end of week 6, I spent Thurs. playing with Balsamiq and mocking up all kinds of ideas. Friday, I spent the day catching up on emails and just getting things in order so I could think straight. Then all I did over the weekend was start setting up my virtual environment.

In Need of a Neck Beard

Sat, 20 Apr 2013 01:26:00 +0000

Neck Beard

In Hackbright we talk and joke a lot about the great, mighty beards of computer scientists and software engineers. Initially, I was clueless to the jokes. Not a fan of beards, I couldn’t understand why anyone would want one.

Apparently, there is a tendency in the computer science community (esp. from the older school) to grow beards. The beards are supposed to be a symbol of the scientist’s knowledge and prowess in the field. We would talk about the long beards and grey beards and so forth. Yes, there was Lord of the Rings references at times when discussing beards.

The Final Project Kick-off

Sat, 13 Apr 2013 07:07:00 +0000

It’s the end of week 6, and we are in the thick of our starting and/or working on the final project. It could be called a type of thesis, and as I mentioned in a previous post, it has caused a lot of excitement over what to do for a variety of reasons. This post is to covey two main points: what I’m doing and key points to get started.

Stomach ache (aka not enough time challenge)

Sat, 06 Apr 2013 15:54:00 +0000

This week I felt like a kid with a nasty belly ache after being left alone in the tech candy shop. There has been so much interesting and fantastic things to learn and experience, and I hit the wall with trying to do it all at once. I know better. My career for the last several years has been about prioritization. Still here I am gorging on the tech candy because it’s so hard not to.

Finding a Project

Sun, 31 Mar 2013 16:06:30 +0000

As we near the halfway mark of our program, the top of mind question is: ‘What project will I work on?’

It can be a stressful question when there is still so much to learn, there are concerns with picking something too simple or too complex, there are so many options to pick from, and that we know it will influence whether anyone at career day will invite us to interview.

Days Blur Together

Mon, 25 Mar 2013 14:49:00 +0000

I can’t believe I’m already 3 weeks into this 10 week program. I was thinking through what we’ve learned so far this weekend and thought it would be helpful to post the core programming concepts to help keep it in perspective.

Week 1

Keyboard shortcuts
Terminal command line
Python language and logic for math, strings, tuples, lists, dictionaries
Git & Github

Week 2

Continuing dictionaries & general Python review
OOP (Object Oriented Programming)
Markov and APIs

Week 3

Hackbright Mentorship Mixer

Thu, 21 Mar 2013 15:37:40 +0000

Hackbright paired us with mentors last night and it was really great to see so many people in the software engineering and development community who came out. There is so much support that they’ve assigned 2 mentors for every student which is awesome.

If there was enough time in the day and I had enough energy, I would have loved to talk to every person who attended to hear their story and perspective on things. The reality was that after a day of studying SQL, which made my brain ache, I was already tired by the time the mixer started. Actually, I seem to be struggling a lot lately with so much I want to know and learn and just not enough time or space to do it. It’s a good problem to have and I would kill for the Matrix brain upload or some kind of Harry Potter time loop thing.

Pair Programming Perspective

Sun, 17 Mar 2013 18:50:00 +0000

For the first two weeks at Hackbright, we’ve been working as pair programmers. We team up with a new person almost every day and spend about 4 to 6 hours programming with our pair.

Each person gets a keyboard, mouse and screen but you share the same OS. Thus, you have to take turns driving the computer and be ready to figure out how to share the work with your partner.

Room Full of Brilliant Women

Fri, 15 Mar 2013 05:58:00 +0000

My favorite part about Hackbright so far has been that I am working with such smart and driven women who are constantly geeking out on technology. It also adds to the challenge of the experience. We had two alumni visiting today that spoke about how they were amazed by their class but also intimidated whether they were good enough to be part of the program.

I come from a background of many years in the consulting industry where confidence is key. Many times you are thrown into a situation where you have to solve ambiguous problems and pretend like you know what you are doing whether you do or you are getting up to speed on the fly. Based on that experience, I know I have a wealth of knowledge and valuable skills as well as I am very capable at applying myself.

Ode to .shutil.move() – ‘Oh how you frustrate me’

Tue, 12 Mar 2013 04:44:00 +0000

In Hackbright, we had a project from our first week that I was finishing this weekend, and it asked us to use the .shutil.move() function. Based on the reading for this function (linked above), it says “The destination directory must not already exist.” This threw me off for a while because you should have the directory already existing to move a file to it.

My experience with coding it and understanding at this point is that you need to create the directory before you reference it in the function and the quote I pulled is more to warn that if something already exists, it will be overwritten. If anyone has a different take on this function let me know and I’ll update the post.

.startswith()

Sun, 10 Mar 2013 20:48:00 +0000

Hackbright Class Spring 2013

8. Its around the age I was when my father brought home our first PC and I learned how to get around in DOS to play games. Fun fact is also used to be the number of standard bits in a byte.

So here I am 30 years later enrolled in the Python programming boot camp, Hackbright Academy, learning how to be a developer (or hacker as I’ve been informed).