Sunday, October 13, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Days 28 & 29 Matz and More

Got into the Matz meetup at Mozilla. Defintely a great experience for my first time. Here are some pics of the event.
How we know we're at Mozilla

Buffet table! 

Open Bar!

And of course me and Matz

There's going to be the Uncubed job fair next week and the Railsbridge workshop at Tapjoy on Saturday. 

Overall: Great end of the week and it's going to be the same this week as well =). Starting on Ruby tomorrow. 


Wednesday, October 9, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Day 27 Version Control System / Git

Moving onto Git and using the terminal. Learning about Version Control Systems (VCS) is something that is becoming much more common. I remember sourcing for a position that required SVN (another VCS) and very few people listed it on their skill set, at least for Tool Developers. These systems saves all the changes made by people working on a project. Anywhere along the process the person in control of the project can revert back to a previous version.

I used to work out of Google Docs and shared network files and sometimes it just became a mess. A person would overwrite a file and we would lose everything, weeks, sometimes months worth of data. Dropbox also saves different versions of your files which is quite handy.

Overall: Feels like I'm making progress. Continuing to learn about Git after class. Few more days and I expect to start Ruby next Monday.

Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Rage Post: Wasted Time Debugging Nothing

OMG!!!! 4 hours of my life gone! Tried to figure out what was wrong with my database connection since nothing new showed up when inserting a new user. Hours later I see that deleting my current rows of data that I inserted manually revealed all the previous information.

Restarted MySQL Workbench, now everything works.

Nothing like spending 4 hours debugging something that wasn't broken. *sad panda* *angry panda* *sad panda* *sleepy panda*

- night folks

/rant

Coding Dojo Review: Day 25 and 26 Resumes and Landing Interviews

The past few days I have been helping some classmates with their resumes and LinkedIn profiles. If you want a breakdown of what should and should not be on your LinkedIn profile please go here: http://withdavidli.blogspot.com/2013/09/why-youre-not-showing-up-on-linkedin.html .

As a former Recruiter and Sourcer I viewed hundreds of resumes per day. And to be frank, most of them sucked. Listing a few of the reasons why they sucked:

  • Sections of experience, eduction, projects, and others were not placed in the conventional manner
  • Using words like "help" or "assisted" when they played a critical role on a project
  • Design / color
  • Lack of contact information
  • Photos and other personal information that were not related to the job
In addition to fixing some of these mistakes we also went over how to deal with agency recruiters, setting timelines for hiring process, and salary negotiations if you think you quoted too low of a salary in the initial phone screen. 


I'm happy to say that in less than 24 hours my classmate that posted his resume was contacted by 5 different recruiters and is already setting up interviews ranging from San Francisco to San Diego.

Overall: I'm always glad to be able to help and to see results this quickly really made my day.

Also, in the past 2 days I finished my Google Directions API assignment and started my advanced OOP. The OOP is giving me a bit of trouble, but onwards I go and hopefully starting on Version Control tomorrow.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Day 24 / End of Week 5: Starting Strong Only Matters If You Finish Strong

4 more weeks left. All there's left on the curriculum are 2 weeks of projects and learning Ruby and Rails. This weekend I finished 2 assignments in OOP and went back to AJAX API assignments.

APIs are extremely useful since it allows you to retrieve data from other web applications like Google Maps for directions or any Weather APIs for local weather info.

Overall: I'm spending 7 days a week at the Dojo currently. It is quite exhausting, but to cover and understand this much material with no background in programming it's what I have to do.

The thing to remember is not to shy away from hard work. And starting strong only matters if you finish strong. 

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Day 23 OOP

Getting to the OOP section and understanding the workings of classes, private, protected, and public properties and methods.

I had some experience with this before going through the Codeacademy Ruby track. Can't wait to start using it large programs where its real strength comes out.

We are also presenting our application idea(s) to the class tomorrow. Listening to advise and requesting help for certain parts of the application if needed.

Overall: I think I have a pretty solid idea that I would like to make a web application and mobile application out of. Most likely going to start it a bit before the last week of the bootcamp and use next week catching up and start on Ruby. It's much more important to me to solidify my knowledge base of the current section and get a head start if possible after next week than to have a mediocore project that I might want to redo using another technology like Rails.

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Coding Dojo Review: Day 22 Meetups and Hackathons

So we found out at the end of the day that we're going to be having a hackathon against the Seattle class next week. Suprise, we're doing it in JavaScript, so we have to learn JavaScript lol. Our instructors were making a course for it anyways and this will be a fun way to motivate students. The trash talking has already began from our northern brothers and it would be rude if we did not respond in kind ;) .

Additional news, signing up for Meetups. Two so far, the first will be in Mountain View to hopefully see Matz, creator of Ruby, speak. The second, a workshop for Ruby on Rails at the TapJoy location in San Francisco.

Overall: We're all starting to get into networking mode. Concentrating on our learning will always come first, but for those of us that are planning to stay networking is essential to land our first positions out of the bootcamp and can't be ignored.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 21 Pagination DONE!!!

Finally finished my pagination this morning!! Thanks to the help of my classmates Jeffrey, Juan, and Jerry! hmmm all of which starts with a Js.

Going over the assingment today in our afternoon lecture I also found out that this is the most advanced assignment we have in AJAX, even though it is listed as intermediate the pagination was added later which increased the difficulty level passed the current advanced assignment.

Going to finish my advanced AJAX tomorrow which involved allowing a user to post, edit, and delete notes. Then starting on OOP later in the day.

Overall: Project week is next week. We're given the option to catch up on courses if we're behind, move ahead in the course work, or doing a project. I'm most likely going to be catching up and moving ahead on class work during next week. We're suppose to have 2 projects done by the end, but I feel that having 1 great project is better than having 2 mediocore projects.

I had 2 projects in mind, both of which can probably be built out using what we have covered in the course. One is heavy on user inputted information so lots of tables for MySQL and the other utlizing APIs for most of the information.

Here's to a good start to October!