Coding Dojo Review: Day 20 Maker's Schedule, Manager Schedule

For those of you who haven't read it go to http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html .

I've almost always been on a manager's schedule, especially when I was in the recruitment industry. Things were interrupting me all the time, daily plans regularly get shifted out of necessity. You never know when that great candidate is finally going to return your call, or that hiring manager who was deemed missing in action by the team is actually alive and demands to know why isn't anyone hired yet... but I digress.

Attending Coding Dojo I have definitely been on a maker's schedule. Today was a prime example why the two different schedules conflict with each other. Morning lecture and warmup took about an hour(9-10am), 2 hour lecture on Git after lunch(1:30-3:30pm) and an hour special session at (4-5pm).

While that left us 4.5 hours of time to code I could barely get anything done after lunch. I was on a roll finally making head way on that damn pagination problem, but the chunks of time to get back in the programming mindset and knowing there was another sheduled lecture/meeting coming up was a pretty big distraction to me.

Today wasn't the norm, usually there isn't a lecture mid-day so there's more uninterrupted time.

Overall: The instructors have just added a Git section to the course. Always a great value when a consumer get more than what they were expecting. The school is continually improving and I'm happy to see them adding/modifying current materials.

Side note: Got a 10/10 for my Green Belt exam!! Totally crushed it like a boss! =D

Green Belt Exam

Finished my Green Belt exam today. This covered PHP and MySQL. Didn't feel confident on the way in, but finished strong. Got everything done in less than 2 hours out of the given 4.

Overall: It says a lot about how much you learn when in entire week you'll be struggling with a subject, and then 1 week later you can completely crush an assignment in 2 hours that would have taken you 8+ hours.

Going to finish AJAX this week and move onto OOP and CodeIgniter.

Why You're Not Showing Up On LinkedIn Searches

In this post I'm going to cover the following:

• How Recruiting Teams Search LinkedIn
• What You're Doing WRONG
• LinkedIn Glitch

How Recruiting Teams Search LinkedIn 

Professional search teams use boolean search strings to find candidates on the internet. Most people have first encountered it during a library course where we find books, or at least I did. That and the Dewey Decimal System were fast forgotten.

You don't have to be an expert in boolean strings. The 3 main things you want to know are:

Operators	What They Do
''Phrases inside quotes''	Searches for the exact phrase. Capitalization does not matter.
''-''	The minus sign gets rid of any page/profile/resume with the keyword right after it. Ex. -manager Will get rid of profiles with manager on them. Exceptions to LinkedIn profiles. Words inside of recommendations do not apply.
AND	The AND operator will only show profiles if all the words are on the profile. Words do not have to right next to each other. Ex. engineer AND Stanford AND doctorate Will return search results with all 3 words. Most likely with engineers who graduated or works at Stanford with a Doctorate. If a page does not have all 3 required words they will be excluded.

Most major search engines and job boards support boolean strings as they are a useful tool to narrow down search results.

In addition to boolean strings filtering systems provided by websites are often used. LinkedIn in particular has a very robust filtering system. One I found much more accurate than any job board's I used. They include:

• Years of experience
• Location by city or zip code radius
• Current and/or past employers
• How long you are in your current position
• Highest level of education
• Field of study for your degree
• Industries that you have been a part of (determined by what your employers are listed under)
• Advanced search engine

What You're Doing WRONG

I'm sure just reading the above section there are some changes you would like to make to your profile. Here are the most common mistakes I have seen profiles.

Categories	What You Did Wrong
Years of experience	Many job boards let the user explicitly decide how many years of experience they have. They usually fill in a little box asking them this question. There is often confusion about this question. Whether they're asking for experience in total years you have been employed, specific industry, specific technology, or level of your current role (e.g. Specialist, Manager, or VP). LinkedIn doesn't ask its user this question. It takes that information from  the years of experience at each employment the user filled out. From my  perspective this has been a much better filtering system than letting the user  explicitly state it for the reasons listed above. Here are some flaws in this system that users may not be  aware of: Listing a position simply as current role. LinkedIn will read this as 0 years of experience without a start date. Listing all the roles you ever had. For example, you have been in a Mechanical Engineer now for 3 years. Many companies are looking for the 3-7 years of experience range so you should be a prime target of recruiters unless you made this error. You had decided to list those 2 years as Pizza Delivery Driver, 3 years in your undergraduate internship, and 2 years in your graduate school all under the experience section. Now instead of being a prime target at 3 years of experience you set yourself up at a senior level target with 10 years of experience.
Detailed Profile	Here are the major fields that you should have filled out: Location by city and state Highest level of education completed (If you haven't completed it yet put the expected completion date.) Employment details If you are still employed put your start date to present. Don't put your end date as the day you are writing it. If people are looking at your profile years later they might think you have been unemployed and doing nothing since that time. Correct and fully spelled out titles and technologies unless they are commonly abbreviated. List all the technologies you feel comfortable with. Give more details about certain items/roles/technologies if you are comfortable with it being a primary responsibility. Examples like developing in Java, designing brakes and safety systems, or mergers and acquisitions. Posting your resume. But if I have all my information on my profile why would I need to post a resume? LinkedIn profiles are formatted differently than what a recruiter is used to and if they download a PDF version of your profile LinkedIn will leave out certain sections of your profile.  Contact information. You want to make contact as easy as possible. InMails can cost up to $10 each. Connecting with you might require your email to send a request. Finding out your contact information on the Google and other methods can be time consuming. If the goal is to be contacted then your profile should make it as easy as possible for people to contact you. But I don't want to deal with SPAM!! An easy way to deal with a large number of people emailing or calling you is to use some of Google's free services. My two favorites are Google Voice for a separate phone number and Gmail which you can connect several accounts and smoothly switch between them. Use these new accounts and check them once a week without intruding on your primary contact info.
Too Much Information!	On the opposite end of the spectrum do not put: Information about targeting a specific position. This isn't necessarily a bad thing to do, but I classify this more towards an active candidate sending in an application for a specific position. I see this on LinkedIn profiles and job board resumes a lot. A recruiter will make many assumptions based on your career progression by themselves. Adding a specific targeted job may exclude you from consideration because it tells recruiters you're interested in nothing else. For example, you're in an Analyst level position wanting to move up to a Manager level position. Two to three years pass and you find out you hate being a Manager, you loathe it from the deepest part of your being and want to return to the good old days of being an Analyst. In the past few years you could have been getting calls for Analyst positions, but your profile said you only wanted to be a Manager. Detailed information about your family. We know, your kids are smart, bright, gifted even. Knowing how well little Timmy is doing at soccer practice will not help you get a job. Horrible profile pictures. There are entire articles written about a professional profile picture. Most people don't care. You can be wearing a t-shirt, sunglasses, on the beach. That's fine with me, if you have the skills I'm looking for. On the other hand if you're the person with a lampshade on their head at a party… Having no profile picture is fine with me as well, but it will make your profile look inactive unless there was a recent update. Over inflated titles and adding titles of high level superiors. This may exclude you from some searches. More information on this on the next section.
Search Engine	This has mainly to do the with ''-'' boolean operator to get rid of false positives. Here are where it usually excludes candidates: Titles - Did you liaise or work with your VP, Manager, Project Manager, or CEO? People like to throw in big titles because they think big titles will catch the reader's attention. In this situation if I'm looking for an Analyst level candidate I will subtract titles like Manager right from the start. Keyword: Recruiter - People might write how a recruiter should contact them, or that they don't want to be contacted by a recruiter. Either way it is a common title excluded from searches because Recruiters tend to list out all the positions they are hiring and/or hired for. Technologies / Skill Sets - Are you a front-end web developer now, then you might want to get rid of instances of the word embedded or back-end. This is a similar case for Financial Analysts who deal with mergers and acquisitions; they should get rid of certain words like tax/taxes. The key here is to do a search on LinkedIn or any job board for your position or target position. See what the results are and determine reoccurring keywords that is associated with results you don’t want. Then either modify or erase those words from your profile. Tip: This might be the time to use abbreviations or the plural form of the keyword. I often take out the word manager because it’s associated with a title, but not managers.
Not Connecting With People!	Just posting a LinkedIn profile isn't enough. I have come across many profiles that are in the single digits of connections. People think that just because their information is on LinkedIn people will be able to find it. While this may be true your profile will be found much later than people's profiles that come up on search results easier and this means missing out on opportunities, like first round of interviews.  So how does making a lot of connections help recruiters find me you might ask. Well, LinkedIn has a free and paid version. For the free version the search results will only show the first 100 results, with the closest  connections showing at the top of the results. For instance, when I search for  "Java Developer" my first 100 results are all 1st or 2nd degree connections. LinkedIn does give the option of searching by 3rd degree connections and  beyond as well, but those profiles are going to have their information  locked from me so I can't see if you're actually qualified (there are ways  around this, but it becomes time consuming). Now, if a person is lucky enough to have an employer, or if they themselves,  invest in a paid recruiter account then the degree of connection won't  matter as much, the searches are limited to 1,000 results. In this case the  right keyword and keyword density will matter much more.

LinkedIn Glitch 

Video of glitch: 

Link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O1qxF9e6wHQ&feature=youtu.be

There is currently a contact setting glitch. When you make any changes to your “Advice for Contacting” section you're message settings will all be turned off. This means you will not be able to receive InMails from LinkedIn Recruiter Accounts. You will have to go into your Account Setting to change them back.

This glitch is being reported to LinkedIn. In the meantime here's how to fix your settings.

To change these settings go to:

1. Privacy and Settings (move mouse over profile picture in top right)

2. Communications section on the bottom left

3. Select the types of messages you're willing to receive

I also like to add my contact info in the Summary section so it's right at the top of the page. 

Hope you found this guide useful!

Coding Dojo Review: Day 19 Coding Dojo Senior Class Demo Day

The senior class had their Demo Day today. It was exciting to see what a person can accomplish with little to no coding experience in 9 weeks.

Projects that caught my attention the most:

• Google Api with Facebook geolocation to track popular places friends visit
• SMS survey built in Python ( this is something that the student decided to learn on her own)
• Web app that is similar to meetup with Google API 

The biggest downside to Demo Day had to be the turnout. Most were the junior class and we had some prospective students. From what other students had heard it seems that the attendance of recruiters and employers has lessened as time went on. This is because they orginally wanted to see the caliber of students the school produced. Once they deemed to have gathered enough information they stope attending. I think this is a pretty big mistake to judge a school so early. The school is continuously improving its material, just today I heard we're going to be piloting a new JavaScript course and there were rumors that the course may be extended to 11 weeks in the future, no confirmation on that. 

Overall: I knew beforehand what the turnout was going to be like by reading past student's blogs, others in the class had attended past Demo Days, still there were some that were surprised by the turnout. Prospective students have to be aware that this is a pretty new school and it's going to take time to establish itself. Past students still visit the Dojo and they talk about their interviews, job offers, and call in when they accepted positions. 

I came in fully aware that I will have to network on my own if I wanted to land a position quickly after graduation. So if you were planning on a school's Demo Day to land you a position you might want to change that mindset, you can't be afraid of doing the legwork. 

Coding Dojo Review: Day 18 O the Syntax Errors!!

Spent a good hour figuring out what was breaking my JavaScript. Misplaced a "$" after a period in the $.post. That for some reason also broke the functions before it. Finished my AJAX basic assignment. Going to spend tomorrow and the weekend working on advanced AJAX, APIs, and my Greenbelt exam covering MySQL and PHP.

Overall: Progress feels slow. Debugging is a way of life. Must test/validate whenever possible.

Tomorrow is the senior class' demo day. The junior class has to help setup and cleanup. Can't wait to see everyones projects! =)

Coding Dojo Review: Day 16 and 17 AJAX ARGGGG

This is the first time I truly feel behind in the class. Wrapping my brain around how AJAX is processed. Today was suppose to be the last day of AJAX on the schedule (only 2 days total) and most people that finished it spent about a week. The tutorials that we're given didn't help much either. Some classmates told me that the instructors are redoing this part of the course so future students will be in better shape.

The scary thing is the next subject is OOP and we're only given 2 days for that as well. One of the people in my group has been on that section since last week. x_X. Not feeling the hope here.

Overall: This is a pretty depressing post, but it just means I have to put even more time in. I'm getting help from my classmates that are ahead and some of the are able to explain it better, luckily one of them is my roommate Jeff =). He just spent 30 minutes walking through the first AJAX assignment with me. Super nice guy! He definitely cleared up a lot of the procedures that was missing in the lessons.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 15 Wall

Got my wall to start working yesterday! It is now able to post messages with correct username and and date times. I'm going to work on making it more efficient today with the messages loading once the page loads by transferring the mysql queries to the wall page instead of continuously traveling back and forth between the process page.

Hopefully starting AJAX by end of the day.

Overall: Lecture on AJAX today, wow, it was a lot of info. Definitely recommend being at least 1 day ahead of the lecture. It goes over information pretty fast and you will have better questions if you attempted the functions beforehand.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 14 End of Week 3

Can't believe it's already been 3 weeks. I finally got my database to connect to the registration page. Over this weekend I will push forward to complete the wall assignment.

Overall: Many of us are hitting walls pretty frequently now. Every assignment is taking at least a day or two because of the concepts and the littles error causes the entire program to crash. The biggest one has been white space error in php. When starting a php session and there's an extra line at the top of the page the entire program crashes.

Finishing PHP hopefully by Tuesday and starting AJAX.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 13 Connections / MySql

Finally finished part 1 of 3 for the forms. I had thought I finished 2 of 3, but was sadly mistaken. The way the videos are laid out has been more confusing than other sections. In this part I am finally going to be connecting the front-end to the databases. The assignment is transfer the information received from the registration page to the proper tables in database I set up so it can be used for a log in that will bring the user to a comment wall.

I was really excited when I thought I had completed part 2 and moved on to the final assignment. There I met with hours of confusion and being overwhelmed. I thought there were the no transition between making a regular form to creating the wall and I would have to figure everything out myself. A challenge I thought to myself, and I believed I was up for it. Well I had it wrong, for better or worse. I'm going to spend most of tomorrow learning how to connect the two and move on to the final assignment hopefully by the end of the day.

Overall: I strongly feel Coding Dojo needs to redo their videos and the way they are structured. While they contain the information that will get you through the assignment there is a lot of signs that they didn't plan the taping beforehand well enough. Not knowing where certain buttons are, correcting formating, and pointing out mistakes with diagrams for 10-20 seconds. These video tutorials is a staple of the course and more dedication to them is needed.

Having this library of videos and instruction is a huge plus in the future. All students will keep having access to them as they update information.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 12 Take a Walk / Frustrations

PHP has definitely been tough for many of us in the class, some more than others. It's where we start connecting the front-end to the back-end, and where there are many moving parts many things can go wrong.

Sometimes you just have to get up and take a walk, get away from the keyboard. Over the weekend I had many of these moments whether it outside of plopping facedown on our gigantic bean bag chair. There's defintely a lot of venting (think of some choice words), but when that problem is finally solved the fists goes up in victory and it's like we can finally breathe. Well, at least till we click the tab to the next assignment x_X.

I've been hitting a wall with the Forms sections. $_SESSION variables aren't working the way I thought they would, adding in CSS with error messages not showing up and might cause me to re-write a large portion of my code or force me to ID every label is driving me nuts. The funny thing is, the last part of this section is actually building a wall, like a wall where users post/comment things. So hitting a wall might become more literal than expected in a day or two.

Overall: Almost done with Part 1 of 3 of my current PHP section. Definitely utilizing the TAs in class and the ones in the Phillipines a lot more. The struggle is there, but sometimes you need the guidance and that's where bootcamps like Coding Dojo pay off. Helping in critical times like these helps push pass parts where a person needs very specific knowledge if a student is unable to find it in documentation, or if things mentioned on sources like StackOverflow include functions we're barred from using.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 11 Forms

Finished up my Fundamental PHP course which runs through the basics of programming (for loops, variables, functions, etc). I'm going on to learn about forms, specifically login forms. There is going to aspects of security in here since these are the ones that ask a user to register username/email/passwords. 

I also took the time to speak to some of the senior class at Coding Dojo. They're going to have their Demo Day by the end of next week! A few of them felt that there definitely isn't enough time to do everything they want. This mostly pertains to learning Rails and utilizing it in their projects. The course as it is now only cover Rails for 1 week and then the week after is used for personal project(s). Though a student did say that a few of his classmates are building their projects with Rails as a main component so it's like 2 weeks of Rails for them, but it's definitely a "do while learning" process. 

Overall: I'm glad I took the extra time this week to get ahead of the course lecture even if it is only a day or two. Knowing the limited amount of time we're going to have for projects I'm going to be spending more time on weekends. Goal is to finish the primary course work a week ahead of schedule to give myself another week to flesh out my project. While the backend work is necessary to make the program work the student I spoke with brought up a good point about UI. Backend tends to be under-appreciated. During the last Demo Day a lot of people really only took a minute or two testing the apps. UI plays a big part in keeping their attention. This should have been a no brainer, but when you're working so much on backend and the time it takes design takes a backseat. I have to start making my assignments look prettier, instead of a bare bones layout that just works, to keep up my CSS skills. Most likely utilize Twitter Bootstrap more. 

Coding Dojo Review: Day 10 PHP

This week is going to be focused on PHP. I spent a most of the weekend coding and a bit a head of the schedule (probably about a day's worth).

Lectures covering PHP is very similar to JavaScript. The functions are mostly same. The things that drive me crazy is missing the '$' before variables. Over the weekend I wracked my brain for hours and finally asked my roommate for help. What do you know? It looked very similar to one of my first attempts, problem with that I left out the '$' when using it in my index x_X. Hours of trying different things and I ended up reverting back to something very close to what I had to begin with.

Overall: It's crazy to think how much a person's perspective can change over the course of doing a few assignments. After finishing 3-4 more exercises today I went back to a PHP exercise that only had CSS left. I ended up refactoring most of the code since it was so sloppy. And there were definitely signs of desperation with trying HTML tags where they didn't belong to get things to display right.

Off to bed now, and another day of coding awaits!

Coding Dojo Review: Passed My Yellow Belt Exam! (HTML/CSS/jQuery)

Super excited about the email I revied when waking up. Passed my HTML/CSS/jQuery exam with a 9.5/10. I was worried since I didn't have time to finish, but again, most of the incomplete work were concepts that I have already completed within other parts of the webpage.

Part of the exam is making a screen capture of the webpage to demo it for the grader. Here we are given a chance to walk through the webpage and explain what worked and didn't work. I used this time as an oppurtunity to explain what I didn't finished and how I could accomplish the tasks while pointing out the different areas of the webpage that I have already executed the concepts required.

Over the weekend I also finished 3 assignments in PHP. Driving me nuts with some of the little mistakes like forgetting a "$" and when to echo out html like "<select>" grrrr.. Thankfully my roommate is going through the same course and was able to help pinpoint them. So helpful to have someone else review your code!

Coding Dojo Review: Day 9 End of Week 2 / Yellow Belt Exam

Yellow Belt Exam!

Consisting of HTML / CSS / jQuery. ~4 hours to complete a web page replication. Definitely tough considering it took most of us 8 hours per web page replication in previous assignments. A good amount of the students got it done, unfortunately I was not one of them. Only had 2-3 more to do (floating unorder-lists, giving divs dimensions, and the like). I got stuck on one part for an hour and that just sucked away the time. Estimate another 10-15 minutes to complete it. It's pretty aggrevating to know you're at the final steps and just run out of time. Hopefully I completed enough to still pass since the remainder of the page were tasks that mirrored ones I already completed for the during the exam.

Overall: My code was pretty darn clean for the exam. I measured everything out and drew diagrams before starting the code and I think having that really help me design the page so boxes weren't horribly off in size and weren't colliding with other objects. I'm pretty happy to see how much I can accomplish in 4 hours now where it would have taken me twice the time a week ago.

I also want to start using in-line blocks more instead of relying on floats. I'm one of the few people in class that uses floats regulary and don't really have a problem with them. I find them faster than using in-blocks since I always have them set within certain divs. But it's always good to change it up and use different tools that are available to us.

Going to code for a good amount of this weekend. Finishing up my week's assignment and getting started on PHP in preparation for next week's course.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 8

SQL Queries and Database Designs

Finished the required assignments on SQL queries. It was fairly straight forward when I got the logic down. There was one function that wasn't explained well on W3schools, the LIKE function. It is used when searching for a value in a column where that column has more than one value so setting an "=" will not return all the results. Thankfully a classmate worked on SQL queries in his recent position helped explain it.

LIKE "%text": will search for values before text.

LIKE "text%": will search for values after text.

LIKE "%text%": will search for values before and after text.

The last one is the most helpful if you don't know where "text" is placed in the column.

Database design / ERD is a lot tougher for me. I sat down with a different classmate that did database designs previously for an hour trying to wrap my head around it. Think I have most of it down where my diagrams can make sense now. Still gotta finish up the assignments for this portion.

Overall: I'm extrememly happy that I'm in an environment with people from different backgrounds. We all bring different sets of experience with us. Looking at the way they code is quite interesting too. Working through their thought process and seeing if there is something I would be better off adopting/incorporating when I code.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 7

Databases

Moving on to designing databases. Learning how to use MySQL and running SQL Queries. We're utilizing MySQL Workbench for most of our work though we can also run it through our localhost. 

The course material isn't as straight forward as the HTML/CSS/jQuery courses. Had to go back and forth between some videos. Doing the SQL Queries first instead of the ERD (diagrams for designing databases). 

Can't wait to start connecting databases to websites.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 6

Finished Front-End

Lecture involved DOM tree and more efficient ways to write code so it doesn't waste resources.

This was the last day for HTML/CSS/jQuery section. Moving on to the back-end.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 5

jQuery Away! 

Well.. more like 5 hours of reading and trying to under their documentation. Was feeling a bit under the weather today and reading technical documentation is a good alternative to taking a sleeping pill (or a bottle's worth).

I also got to use jQuery UI. Definitely makes front-end design easier.

Overall: Working with libraries is pretty straight forward. I'm super impressed that people created and decided to share all their hardwork with the community. To replicate anything close to to one of these libraries would take years. Anything from calander apps to sortable lists are there was a few lines of code when it would originall take 50-100 lines, and that's if it would even work/look right. Thanks to every developer who contributed to these wonderful libraries! =)

Coding Dojo Review: Day 4

End of the first week and HTML/CSS classes. The day's lecture covered zeroing-out, normalizing, and Twitter Bootstrap.

Over this weekend I finished my last webpage replication assignment as well as re-doing my first blog assignment (pure HTML) by adding in Twitter Bootstrap (version 3). It's crazy to see 6,805 lines of CSS. Have to take the time in the future to go through it.

I also started learning jQuery. Going through the documentation right now and will start the jQuery classes starting tomorrow. Can't wait to make my websites all interactive =).

Coding Dojo Review: Day 3

More CSS! And Group Assignment! 

So most of the class have finished their first and some their 2nd website replication. This morning we were suprised with a group assignment! Replicate a website page in about 1.5 hrs. Currently most of us have been taking ~6hrs to replicate each page. Each group had about 4-5 people so this was reasonable if all the work was divided.

Most of us came pretty close to replicating the webpage within the allotted time. The biggest challenge is when we put all the HTML and CSS together. For HTML if some forgot to close a tag it carried over to the rest of the code. With CSS some duplicate code caused things to mis-align and text to overflow.

Overall: I'm quite happy with how I'm progressing through this course. While the webpages we have to replicate is getting progressively harder the amount of time required stays relatively the same. Our instructor, Dexter, also built out the first webpage in 45 minutes to show us how he would do it. Going back I would be confident that it would take me about 45-60 minutes to replicate the first site from scratch now.

Coding Dojo Review: Day 2

CSS: It's all about making things pretty! 

Woke up at 5am today. Either the time difference from the east coast is having more of an effect on me than I originally thought, or this is just mentally exhausting causing me to sleep much earlier. Probably a bit of both. 

Started and finished assignment 1 of 4 for the CSS portion of the bootcamp. These assignments involve replicating static websites. All those text boxes I took for granted in blogger, now I have to not only make them myself, position them too. Each website get progresses in difficulty. The first one was a plain website with texts and hyperlinks. The second one includes a banner, picture, search bar, and more. 

It's pretty overwhelming when looking at a new website to replicate (on my second one). Brain is just digesting all the CSS that needs to be done, calculating how many pixels is a box away from a boarder and the dimensions of every textbox / container. Breaking down the overall layout with divs has helped calm my mind a lot in these beginning stages. Once the page is laid out everything seems much more doable. Proabably most of the page is now filled with boxes so it's not a blank canvas staring you in the face. 

Overall: I definitely feel that it was a good idea to come to this bootcamp. Working with people on the same assignments helps tremendously when stuck. Today some of my code kept breaking because I had closed a link tag in the wrong place while nesting another unordered list in it. The selectors I was using kept breaking because of this and I wasn't able to modify the nested list. With the help of a TA who figured out the problem in a matter of minutes (after I had another student look at it) I was able to move on. Problems like these would have taken me hours to figure out by myself. It's something that's not easily recognizable as "wrong" and may have taken days to figure it out with the help of online communities.   

If nothing goes wrong the amout of work completed should be similar if I was working by myself, but things go wrong, and often. This is when working in bootcamps like Coding Dojo saves expotential amount of time. Even when working by myself the amount of time dedicated in a single day at Coding Dojo can sometimes be equivalent to a week working alone due to work and other obligations. 

CSS until the end of the week. Looking to complete my second CSS assignment and moving onto the third. 

Coding Dojo Review: Day 1

Day 1 at Coding Dojo! 

My first impression: they have way more space than I thought. They have at least 3 spaces in the plaza and apparently opening up another school in the Seattle area.

What we learned: 

• 1 hour lecture of an overview of what front-end, back-end, database, and servers are
• Setting up local development environment
• Intro to HTML and a lot of us started on CSS 

Teaching / Learning Environment: 

• 1 instructor, 2-3 on-site TAs, and 3 off-site TAs in the Phillipines (everyone was very responsive)
• A lot of the materials are online using their platform (instructional videos, document materials, and, assignments)

Food! 

Yes! There's a food section as Coding Dojo provides lunch and dinner. We had Mediterranean for lunch and Hawaiian BBQ for dinner. That dinner was awesome. Have to say originally thought they would just be feeding us sandwiches, salads, and fruit so I was blown away with what they provided meal wise. 

Overall

Good first day. Wasn't that overwhelming since I went over HTML/CSS track in CodeAcademy. Feedback from other students say that the assignments for CSS take a lot longer due to positioning of each pixel and getting colors right. 

I also liked that so much of the material is online since it makes working on the assignments a lot easier when away from the school. First day went from 8:30 am to 6 pm though many people stayed later.