amelialaundy

[amelialaundy]

On the other side

How I ended up learning to code, teaching at bootcamp and tripling my income in less than one year.

One year, or twelve months, or 365 days. Whichever way you look at it, my life has changed tremendously for the better over the past year.

Exactly one year ago today (or possibly tomorrow if you consider timezones), I was accepted into an intensive 18-week, $11,000 programming bootcamp.

I had never met anyone from said course, or seen their offices, let alone written a line of code. Enter stage left- Enspiral Dev Academy (EDA).

This sounds like a massive gamble, and, yes -- my friends and family had a few reservations about me handing over a deposit to some grand-sounding course in New Zealand while on a visit home in the UK. But, there really is no other way to describe this choice than as the greatest choice I will ever make.

EDA did not teach me how to dedicate myself to one thing for consecutive years, nor to pass exams, or learn by rote something I will never apply in a real job.

They taught me how to use my encephalon (and no, they didn’t teach me that word, Google did). Not only have I learned how to learn at an accelerated rate (specifically Ruby, JavaScript and related technologies) but I have also learned to have the confidence to unabashedly say this is what I am good at and it’s what I want to do.

One year ago…  ⁃ I had just quit my hospo job, sold my car, stopped renting a room, boxed up my stuff, and flown home to the UK - hopefully to figure out what I could do to be happy  ⁃ I had all the time in the world, and nothing to do  ⁃ I had no idea how the internet worked, what Terminal was, and had certainly never heard the words 'instance variable' before  ⁃ I had very little money and was earning less then 25K a year

Anyway what has happened in the last year?

This year…

I have accepted what is soon to be my third developer role

I have no time, and all the things to do! I have also decided that that is my definition of ‘grown up’.

I have a pretty good idea how the internet works, what Terminal is, and I definitely know what an instance variable is

I have nearly tripled my income

One constant that hasn't changed is my computer preference - I owned a MacBook then, and I do now. And, although it's been swapped out for an upgrade, my old white 2009 unibody MacBook is now an homage to my code-learning journey.

So, having been accepted onto EDA’s 18-week course, I dabbled in Codecademy online and generally freaked out about how to pay the rest of the tuition fee.

On returning to New Zealand I was going to have to go through the routine of finding a new room and a new hospo job. At this point I knew for certain that although hospitality had been a provider of income, laughs and life learnings, it wasn’t going to satisfy me enough to be truly happy.

But I also knew that I needed cash to pay the tuition, plus as much money as I could save to live on during the 9 weeks of actual bootcamp. This is how I came to live on ~$50 a week after rent for around 6 months of 2014.

My previous blog posts go into more depth about my experience throughout phase 0 (the 9 week preparatory phase for EDA) and also the 9 weeks at bootcamp.

In summation, I put every ounce of energy into making this choice worthwhile -- from waking up at 5 or 6am to go to work in a cafe during phase 0 and coming home at 5pm to study through until 1am, to saving free pizza from our weekly tech talks at EDA for the following day's lunch. (A glass of water in the microwave seems to stop the pizza drying up).

Graduation soon came around, and shortly after that came the emails to employers, interviews, coffees, and technical interviews and challenges.

I actually really enjoyed the interview process; I think this came down to not applying to any actual listings, but to contacting prospective employers directly to hopefully snag some kind of coffee chat. This would turn into coffee #2 sometimes, a Skype chat with other developers and technical interviews, or code challenges on- and off-site.

I ended up with three solid offers. When you have choices you are never in a bad position, but this part of the process--early October last year--was the hardest part for me (well, apart from public speaking to a crowd!)

To be presented with offers from some great Wellington companies only 4 months since I touched code was a little daunting and made for a difficult decision.

Yes, they were all good offers if it was that hard to choose between them, but they were not all good in equal ways. If one offer was great for x, another offer was great for y.

It turns out everyone knows everyone here in Wellington and if they're not a perfect match for you, they’ll more than likely recommend another company you might be interested in, or ask you to come back in a few months.

I decided on Hoist as my offer of choice, and by November I was employed as a software developer in a team of three, writing in Node.js (I didn’t really know what that was).

One of the things I learned at Hoist is that 'not knowing' is actually great. You come in and you are like the plankton in the ocean. When you turn around a few months down the track you realise that you’re now a kind of goldfish that's slightly higher up the food chain than the plankton…or something like that.

Yes, everything was a little murky to begin with, my comfort zone had been left way behind, it probably is for everyone in their first job.

I spoke to others in my position and they felt exactly the same; it’s the fear of the unknown that’s the worst--once you have a foot in the door it’s like you’ve always been there.

I learned a crazy amount in the deep-end during my internship with Hoist, from servers to ssh, mongoDB and promises, and of course Node.

They were great, and treated me as a developer rather than the novice I felt. It was sad to leave them but I wish them the best as they expand into San Fran (go Hoist!)

After my three months there, I felt so much more confident to go out into the world of developers and etch a name for myself.

And so the process started over with looking for the next job. Ok, wow, 7 months after starting to code I’m looking for my second job.

It was such a surreal feeling, but it was awesome to see how far I'd come.

I started interviewing with TradeMe after having met them when I was looking for my first job.

The pressure can seem heightened when you have been in the industry a little while as you don’t have the excuse of ‘I’ve just finished bootcamp so I don’t know that answer’; but I definitely felt so much more prepared having seen the real world of coding, testing, ci, deploying, servers and already nearly doing the everyone-does-it-once-drop-the-database routine.

Experience and degrees don’t seem to count for a lot. Even with just the three months experience that I had managed to get, and without a degree or any other qualifications I wasn’t worried about finding another position -- being a developer is great!

Around the same time, EDA came to me and offered me a full time teaching/coding position back with them, and I couldn’t say no.

I decided to try it out for a while while I considered my options, so I jumped on that and that’s how I’ve ended up becoming a teacher at EDA, full circle.

On the other side. It’s awesome.

I get to teach other people to do the thing I love all-day, every-day. I hang out with some of my favourite people and get paid. I grow my circle of coding related friends every day, and if I don’t want to teach on a given day I just build some tools for EDA in Node (go Node!).

Some of the stressors of being on this side of the bootcamp include feeling a certain level of responsibility towards the current cohorts.

Their future is, like mine was, in EDA's hands, and knowing you have way more to do than can be done in a day can make you just as busy as the students in the bootcamp. Even more respect goes out to those who taught me during my time, as a student you don’t quite realise how much work and effort goes into keeping EDA alive.

What next?

I went through further interviews with TradeMe and chose to accept a job in their API team, learning C# (I wrote my first C# the other day!).

For me, EDA is where my heart will always lie (it’s where I fell in love with code), but I need to continue growing.

I think choosing a job that keeps pushing me to learn more, like learning C# (amongst other things) at TradeMe, will help me accomplish that goal.

So in one week I will start my TradeMe journey, 373 days, or 53 weeks after this crazy journey started…

[amelialaundy]

Life after bootcamp

Ok so one more slightly bootcamp inspired blog post...maybe.

Well despite my original fears I've made it four weeks out of Enspiral Dev Academy sane and happy although real life did seem harder than bootcamp at first!

On being released into the wilds of Wellington I felt a pang of bittersweet excitement that I swear felt like I had predicted only days before at the very start of this incredible adventure but was in fact 18 weeks ago.

In the past 4 months I've experienced a very specific emotion precisely three times; that of the excitement of the unknown, mixed with the confidence of a good choice having been made and the knowledge that whatever the future brings it will shine. The first of the trio was the 2nd of June, my first day of phase zero at Dev Academy and the beginning of where I am now. Watching my MacBook screen downloading Ruby, Git and all sorts of mysterious things whilst not really understanding what was happening or where it would end up. Secondly the 2nd of October was the end of that era, D-day minus one to be exact with graduation day at Dev Academy only hours away. This day I felt a sense of achievement and happiness at the start of something new but it was also by far the most nerve-wracking one of the three, somewhat surprisingly. Lastly yesterday the 2nd of November marked the day before I embarked on the final part of this years puzzle; my first day on the job as a software developer at Hoist. Today I'm proud to say I've achieved something that I dreamt up one August afternoon last year with no clue of how to achieve it and I can't quite believe I'm here now.

They do say things come in threes but perhaps 2 should be my lucky number.

Four weeks seems like a lot of time during bootcamp but it simply flies by back in the real world, days filled with CV writing, stalking checking out the rest of the cohorts online footprint, going for coffee interviews, technical interviews, figuring out 'what do I want?' and picking my way through an industry I knew very little of mere months ago. Oh and taking-it-easy. Wow I didn't see that last one sneak up on me until very late in the day! It's still hard to be out of the mentality that there's always a long list of bootcamp challenges to be done or tests to be written or code to be refactored or 200 hours of work to be done in just 100, but I'm slowly getting back to a healthier routine. Not to forget our next cohort (the Wekas) has started at Dev Academy so there's always coaching to be done or just simply hanging out in what feels like one of my homes now.

A few real-worldy-things I got to do this past month:

Bake a cake

Go out for dinner

Buy a beer

Go wine tasting

(Yes I like food & drink related tasks)

Have multiple lie ins

Wear fancy dress

Watch live comedy

Shake my fist at the Yosemite upgrade

Read a book

So I can't really complain about life after Dev Academy, the people, the routine and the environment are equally missed but, aside from the people, will be replaced by an equally awesome new chapter. I have a feeling there's a mountain of learning ahead of me and I've only really just traversed a mole hill in comparison.

Oh yeah I forgot to mention, I got to deploy first day on the job yiewwww!

[amelialaundy]

Flying the nest

Nine weeks ago I could not have envisaged where I would be today and none of it would have been possible without the relentless hard work and dedication of the staff at Enspiral Dev Academy. I stand today a different person than that of nine weeks ago.

Boot camp has been so much more than 12 hours days and 6 day weeks, it has given me access to something I am so incredibly passionate about and set all of us up for a great leaping pad into the ocean of code I see before us. Coding at EDA has also engaged many of us in the plight for a positive local and global community; the founders of Enspiral are truly passionate and excited about coding for a better future for all and that definitely has rubbed off on many of us.

EDA has taken us twelve fledgling kereru into their nest, shared their knowledge, friendship and resources, grown our wings and 9 weeks later have gently removed the comforts and safety of that nest. Three days have passed and I still feel like I am free falling from the high of Dev Academy, after such intensity it is hard to get my feet back on the real ground.

For myself the whole of boot camp has been one massive high, emotionally I have never felt better and I am so proud to say that I enjoyed every second of it. This enormous semi-permanent feeling of near euphoria for nigh on 3 months has proved quite hard to come back down from. Although I haven't entirely shaken that feeling it has been replaced with excitement for the future and for my career in the tech industry where I hope to host my next nest.

Onto the actual content of our last week at EDA and I'm not entirely sure what happened: a lot of lost sleep, a whole heap of hard work and an emotional few days were had by all. Mostly my experience of the last 7 days at boot camp were those of wading knee deep in code, many many pull requests and far too many recitals of the final presentation spent pacing the school kitchen on friday!

The last week consisted of each team (four people per team) working far harder than before on their final application and finally realising the complexity of producing a fully tested working application in just a week. Check our team Run Rabbit Run out here!

For myself it was a week of many emotions, high stress but not stressful andthe attempt to put all of our accumulated efforts into our final team project was harder than the code itself. The process of summing our achievements in a ten minute presentation on graduation day was hard to do justice and even harder so with the biggest surprise of my life.

To elaborate a little further on said surprise: we were working away on our final project on Wednesday night with 12 hours to go until code freeze, a break from studies was much needed and so a wee jaunt on Cuba street ensued. By a wee jaunt I mean a wee jaunt; to my utter delight I look at the people walking towards me and see a woman of my mums height and stature, on second and third glance I become dumfounded for the first time in my life with the realisation that this is in fact my mum, from the other side of the world she has miraculously appeared.

And so this is how much of last week was an emotional, amazing, blur of a roller coaster. Needless to say my thoughts of jasmine testing were out of the picture pretty soon on Wednesday night, (I did have to take a while to persuade myself that the hard work of the previous 8 weeks will have made up for this one night off far in advance), and I re-entered the real world for a few hours to celebrate this perfect surprise.

Friday, our day of reconciliation, brought with it the most nerves I have ever experienced and I would like to thank all of those who showed such incredible support before, during and after my hardest part of Dev Academy. All the code, long nights and emotional EE sessions could not compare to getting up and presenting to around 30 people, that has got to have been the most taxing part of my whole experience. Having so many of my family and friends meant the world to me, to anyone considering a bootcamp-9 weeks of sacrifice was quickly made up after 9 minutes of graduating!

With much frivolity and pleasure we finalised our time with each other on Friday afternoon in many ways from Samson's Tunnel of Love (I'm sure he named it more aptly and appropriately but right now the name evades me!) which allowed us to share many heartfelt feelings for each other, to Gazing to the Future with Joshua and onto the much anticipated party.

This is my last blog in this series but I'll be sure to start up a new blog, possibly in aid of 'Life After Dev Academy', but for the moment I'm sure I, like many others, will have plenty to keep us busy (looking for our next job).

Firstly I would like to extend a hand of gratitude and appreciation to the rest of Enspiral Dev Academy Kereru Cohort:

Adam

Dan

Grace

Juliet

Jasmin

Jaimie

Jess

Karen

Linden

Richard

Steve

Secondly to our inspirational leaders into the unknown, from Ruby, C#, Javascript, SQL, job seeking and many others:

Darcy

Joshua

Rohan

Samson

I would like you all to know how incredible it has been to have had you on our team and the fact that we won't ever really leave is going to keep me buoyed when the Dev Academy Blues hit in.

Thirdly and finally I'm finding it hard to summate my time at EDA and so will leave you with the best I have:

After travelling to many new countries and cities around the world and having made many new homes along the way I can happily say that Enspiral Dev Academy, wherever it or the people may be, will be one of these special homes.

[amelialaundy]

Run Rabbit Run

Week 8 has been one of many firsts...

It was the first time:

I didn't write a single line of code for a whole day-Thursday during final project planning

I wrote my blog very early on a Monday morning...

I spent every day of the week at EDA

and the last time that we get to approach a week long project(final projects!)

we got to pitch an application idea to the rest of the cohort

I realised that we can make ALOT of cool stuff happen

that half the cohort unfortunately got sick

And many lasts...

It was the last time:

we had 'normal' week at EDA-not that there is one

we get any sleep during EDA

all of us would spend time with the whole cohort rather than our final project teams with whom we are now glued to 24/7

Our penultimate week at EDA has been chilled, exciting, nerve-wracking, crazy, and a very happy one for me. The former half of this week was focused on furthering our JavaScript knowledge, dabbling with the Knockout.js framework, rewriting JQuery (a JavaScript library) from scratch, more OOJS and creating a draggable online PostIt note board.

Final Project Pitches For the final eight days at EDA we build something in teams using all of our knowledge that we have accumulated over the last 8 weeks. Thursday was pitch day and so members of the cohort who wished to had the chance to pitch any ideas they had for an application with three ultimately being chosen. These included an application that displayed heat maps of data, a site that can look at a websites tree and nodes in order to streamline it, mobile applications, a mobile book library tracker, a site to gift belongings rather than sell them and a multiplayer game.

It was incredible to hear such a wide variety of pitches, from the scope of the technology to the idea itself. I pitched a game idea Run Rabbit Run, and was lucky enough to have it chosen, in which multiple players move about a google map in order to find the 'rabbit' player. Every so often the location of the rabbit is broadcast to all the players via a Google Maps Street view rendering on each players game page. The aim is to try to find the rabbit based on the Google Maps Street View and move your player within a certain radius of the rabbit to win. It is a front end heavy application, not necessarily out of planning but that's how it's ended up, with a Rails back end with whom I have come to terms with (re: last weeks blog).

Thursday put me on a high that I just can't shake off, I have a great team working on the game alongside me and the way it is evolving at the moment I think really shows that boot camp has paid off! In a day or two I'm sure we will all be exhausted and won't want to deal with any more extra features(perhaps a wormhole for the rabbit or psychic sight for the players to see the rabbit when they want, who knows), error messages or the tests breaking but for now I'm certain everyone is enjoying themselves.

Nothing else too crazy to report back, those that have been ill are catching up at a great pace and everyone is just crazy busy working on final projects. Tomorrow is MVP (minimum viable product) day so we will present to our tutors what we have pulled together so far, hopefully they won't pull them apart at the seams! After that we are only left with 48 hours until code freeze, leaving one day for refactoring and tidying followed by a final day to polish our presentations.

FRIDAY IS GRADUATION DAY!!!!

I can not believe how fast 9 weeks can pass.

The excitement is building pretty fast for myself, I am so elated to have come so far in such a short time and to be entering the real world of programming in one more week. I really don't wish EDA to finish, I will certainly make the most of being surrounded by so many great individuals and having tutors giving us their utmost attention every day during this final push. Job hunting isn't really crossing my mind at this stage, although we are all aware of it, I just want to focus on and complete this week before I can start to think about anything else.

Stay tuned for one final blog post in this series next week: The End of EDA...

[amelialaundy]

Falling off the Rails

I'll be honest, this week at EDA I have struggled with my self achievement and confidence. Most of this was unsupported and probably mainly due to the fatigue of having had around three days off out of the last 16 weeks so not such a huge surprise but something that sent me off kilter temporarily.

Phase three has introduced us to Ruby on Rails and all the magic this gem does behind the scenes has been a source of my current discomfort. For others in my cohort Rails was a blessing whereas I saw it as more of a curse; I find that I need to know how and why things work before I'm willing to employ their usefulness and so this is how I came to feel I had fallen out with my first love, Ruby.

Perhaps I'm the controlling one in mine and Ruby's relationship, she is eloquent, beautiful and amazing, but as soon as I lost my handle over her and handed it over to rails I felt a little lost, Ruby was making her own decisions without me! Don't get me wrong, I am slowly coming around to the Rails way of doing things and accepting that the conformity that Rails provides is on the most part helpful.

Week seven has taught me more about myself and my learning style than code; The following are a few things I have realised this week:

I need to provide my own structure when I am not given it externally

Attaining code related achievements does not necessarily mean that I will have a solid application to show for it and that this doesn't matter

When faced with things such as Rails and all the stuff it does behind the scenes I need to find a way of learning the how's and why's

TAKE A BREAK! I partook in the 'real world' this weekend and it was a much needed refreshment. Manage a work life balance better

My support network at EDA is incredible

After a bit of a meltdown on friday afternoon I received a lot of support from fellow cohort members and tutors alike, this is one of the especially great things that EDA nurtures, it's a safe environment to announce vulnerability.

On more of an upbeat note I am still loving EDA, coding, Ruby, even javascript is a pretty sweet language that I'm enjoying more and more. I've spent this weekend recuperating and catching up with friends over Skype in the UK and others from Auckland, I even ventured out into the world of Saturday night drinks! Sometimes less is more, some advice I would give to anyone considering a code bootcamp would be to average out your time spent studying hard, a day off here and there is better than having to 'binge break', saving days up to take time off at meltdown point.

Bootcamp is slowly wrapping up in front of our eyes, with the most exciting part only a few days away: final projects. And so this is how I will spend the rest of my weekend, researching and gathering ideas in the hope to pitch a final project on Thursday in our last push to the finish line.

[amelialaundy]

a-p-i eeeoo a-p-i yeah!

The softer side of week six at boot camp has astounded me, as well as the 'harder' side but I'll get onto that later. We spend a lot of time working on our soft skills-collaborating with other people, working towards a positive studying environment, as well as our hard skills-studying to enable ourselves to make anything we dream from code. Believe me I do dream in code now!

My fellow boots/colleagues/friends have shown me such great generosity when I didn't expect it and I am so appreciative of the support and kindness I have received; from being gifted a bottle of wine as a thank you to a free coffee here and there, even free food (major score!) I couldn't have wished for a better group of people to share this crazy experience with. As to my friends in the real world (I've nearly forgotten what that is) they have also been amazing and understanding of my limited time to spend socialising but still answer my phone calls when I do find some time. So a massive thanks to everyone who has contributed to this!

Onto the harder side of week six at EDA and we have encountered APIs (application programming interface) and so can now build web applications that retrieve data from other services such as iTunes to display a list of the users chosen artists, their tracks, even the current price for that track in the iTunes store, or sites such as Facebook & Twitter to see what's trending on those sites or you could even do analytics on trending topics, anything you want really!

This week has been a personal favourite of mine, one because of the people I have been around as mentioned earlier, and two because I can now build meaningful applications hosted on the internet for anyone to use, using real data sourced from other sites, this was almost too exciting!

I am particularly proud of my first application that uses APIs, it incorporates google maps javascript API, google geocoder API and an Instagram API. I started off just wanting to use a google maps API in some sort of way and 24 hours later I actually ended up with something I'm pretty happy with.

The basic idea went from being able to search from my website any latitude and longitude in the world and get a google map to zoom in on that location-wahey I've just built a crappier version on the existing google maps! So I figured I needed to do something more that just rendering someone else's map... Along came the Instagram idea and soon I was displaying a list of public Instagram users' photos taken around the selected longitude and latitude-still a little basic as it wasn't being shown on a map and required you to know the latitude and longitude.

My biggest 'aha' moment had to be when I managed to write some javascript code to render markers onto the map representing where each Instagram image had been taken, I still can't get over the joy that code brings me!

A summation of my application currently is a site that allows a user to enter any location in the world, be it a street address or just a city name, the google map on the page will then zoom into that location and display 20 clickable markers of the twenty most recent Instagram photos taken within a one kilometre radius of the specified location, the user can then click on any of those markers and up will pop the Instagram image and username. If this interests you, you can check it out here.

Week six here also marked the end of another phase and the beginning of another, final phase, number three. So of course we partied as hard on friday night as we had on thursday and friday this week working on a whole cohort project. More food, drinks, games and good times were had by all, I think everyone was pretty happy with where they were come friday and although we hadn't quite seamlessly linked our whole cohort project we had come so close. 

The cross stream 12 person project, well 15 if you include our awesome tutors, was to build a multiplayer game where players move their piece on a board by tapping the arrow keys on their keyboard to try and land on a 'jewel' to gain more points. The front end included three groups of people working on javascript and the backend was one ruby group and one sharpie group both of which were working with each other to interpret a players move and persist the game state to the database. Crazily enough we got the bulk of the work done and we just needed to perfect the messages being sent between each part of the application.

Our tutor Josh spent a large part of our friday night party determinately trying to stitch together all of our group efforts so that we could have a chance to play the game we had all worked so hard on. I'm not sure where he got up to, but knowing him he's probably fixed it all up with some black magic and is playing it right now! Big shout out to him!

Finding myself between phases again has meant I've aired on the side of a 'no-code' weekend so far but I hope to work on my API project and get some other cool features I've not even thought of yet working.

Tomorrow marks, for the rubyists, our first real introduction into Ruby on Rails. I'm not entirely sure what we will get our hands into but we've all heard how cool Rails is and I for one can't wait to jump on that train.

[amelialaundy]

It just keeps getting better

We are over the halfway mark at dev academy! Yikes.

I'm not sure that being halfway means that we have learnt 50% of the course content, in fact I have a feeling that the learning curve is much more an exponential one than a linear one! If my instincts are true then that means that the multitude of information I have crammed into my cranium for the last five weeks is less than what I will gain in the next four...

Yes my brain is teeming with piles of information, ideas and questions but it couldn't be in a happier place. During the last few weeks we have started participating in 'lightning talks'; lightning talks are 4-5 minute talks by each student on a chosen topic relevant to this weeks learning objectives. This means that we gain a brief insight into a broad range of areas and can dip our toes in a little deeper if we are interested in a particular topic. I have quite enjoyed presenting lightning talks, albeit a little nerve-wracking, it's good fun to have a chance to teach the rest of the cohort although they sometimes put you on the spot with difficult questions!

Javascript has been the centre of attention in week 5, allowing us to animate images across the screen, make text fade in and out, and even create a game in which the gamer uses the keyboard arrow keys to move a rocket across the screen and land it on an island to gain points (my teams group project this week).

Everything seems to be wrapping up nicely together: Ruby plays nicely with Psql (object-relational database management system ORDBMS) to talk to the database, javascript comes running along, knocks on ruby's door, takes the information she gives and fires it onto the page, in turn the HTML changes based on the information that ruby provided javascript with and this is all because someone clicked on one element on a web page!

The possibilities seem endless and sometimes overwhelming, yet every week when I sit down to write this blog I realise I have accomplished far more than I believed I would this time seven days ago. A brief list of the areas we have touched this week:

Javascript

Jquery

Ajax

Json

OOJS

The DOM

Jasmine testing (behaviour driven development)

Capybara testing

MVC JavaScript

The list goes on...

Some things I have realised so far at EDA:

I can survive on very little- I am currently budgeting at $50 p/w after rent & bills and still manage to have spare cash at the end of some weeks 

I can't forgo a bit of Whittakers Hokey Pokey chocolate at least once weekly even if I am skint! (check out their website-damn cool)

I actually quite miss my spare time

I LOVE studying

I am a geek-check out this wiki for some clarification

My fellow students are astoundingly helpful, kind and generous

Blogging is fun, but not as fun as code

Code is EXCITING

Next up are APIs which currently sit in the blurred area of my vision, I'm really not entirely sure what this coming week will entail but it's sure to be just as fun and new as everything else so far has been.

I am looking forward to a brief wind down this coming friday after the completion of phase two before we hit the 'home stretch' of phase three. Bootcamp seems to be flying past at a considerable rate, before we know it we will all be released into the wild world of programming, I just hope it doesn't fly past too quickly.

[amelialaundy]

get '/week4' do web-development

People often remark that I'm pretty lucky. Luck is only important in so far as getting the chance to sell yourself at the right moment. After that, you've got to have talent and know how to use it.

- Frank Sinatra

You may be asking the relevance of this quote in my blog about coding and suchlike, well hang on and we'll get there!

Week 4 at Enspiral Dev Academy has entailed becoming acquainted with many a new magical mystery, namely Sinatra. Sinatra has taken us from being developers to WEB developers in a matter of days. Since my last blog post I have officially, along with my team members, got an application up and running on the internet-the real, larger than life, internet! *~Pause to celebrate here~* And so I thought what better way to briefly metaphor-ize again the experience of EDA than through the words of the man himself.

We (the Kereru cohort at EDA) have had a certain measure of luck, somehow we have all managed to end up spending most of our waking moments in the same room as 11 other 'lucky' individuals, working on making our futures much much brighter. But luck is merely an ion in the scheme of things; we have all established that we have a talent for coding and now have the chance to concrete this talent into a utilisable skill.

Anyway back to business, we have established that Sinatra came along for the journey this week, along with our new friend ActiveRecord-both of whom I think will be hanging around for a while-and so we have learned the ins and outs of creating applications for the web. What we didn't know before now seems all so obvious; how to use the URL of a page to navigate through a web of files telling which pages to render, what things to grab from the database and how to save some new information back to the database. Thats it really, pretty simple, in theory!

As crazy as I expected this week to be, all in all it hasn't been the roller-coaster that we expected thankfully, but I do feel that I've come such a long way in only three days. The first half of the week was dedicated to learning how to use Sinatra, understanding that with a few simple commands/methods we could get a webpage loading content and directing us places. Thursday and Friday were group projects days, yep our first two day group projects, where we could all roll up our sleeves and get our chosen application up and running on heroku (Cloud Application Platform-basically it hosts our applications on the net for us).

Many groups chose the suggested idea of created "lil' twitter' and everyone achieved this with great aplomb and delivered great web applications on friday afternoon. I personally really enjoyed working on the database for our application, mainly to enable users to follow other users, and for the same user to be followed by other users...my head was spinning a bit by the end of this!

The first of our Personal Projects has been handed to us, and with it a whole lot more time dedicated to another area of study. I believe it's a great way for us to individually solidify our knowledge and learning, whilst really making something 'ours'. I am currently working on an online shopping cart that lets you add things to it, store it and come back to it later to either add, remove or order items from the cart. So far its been great although a little confusing as I'm pretty sure I've ended up putting users in my shopping cart as opposed to shopping items...

Next week is Javascript week so I'm currently brushing up on that, I predict I will definitely be having some Ruby withdrawals-luckily I still have my personal project to keep me in her good books-Javascript is set to be a lot of fun, making our web applications even more exciting!

“The best is yet to come and won't that be fine.”  ― Frank Sinatra

[amelialaundy]

Nothing can phase us

Week 3, phase one in the bag! N.B first EDA party (in celebration of our survival so far at boot camp) also complete!

What a way to wrap up our first three weeks here-more burgers and Thai food than you could imagine, coupled with a drink to suit everyone’s taste. This was matched by a perfectly balanced atmosphere of happiness, excitement, satisfaction, relief that we all made it this far and a sense of here comes phase 2 and with it the hard(er) graft! Although we have all achieved so much is such a short time, as Rohan said to me in this weeks check in, we have been motoring along in ‘gear 2’ and in only a few short sleeps we will hit ‘5th gear’-when I learnt to drive 5th gear was reserved for top speeds, I guess this gives us an idea of what to expect.

Not-so-wonderful-wednesday: I had my first ‘bad’ day at dev academy this week, which I think I can be grateful of as it wasn’t that horrendous and others have certainly had more than one of these days so far, but nonetheless it was a relief to reach the 6pm check in on wednesday. I’ll give you a wee insight into what happened in this mid-week crisis; week three has been focused on creating, reading, updating and deleting databases (or performing ‘crud’-which is more of a light swear word where I come from than an acronym for the use of databases-I did feel the former was a better use of the word on this day!) but now we had been told of this mystical, magical being called ‘Active Record’…

”Active record will cure all ailments between you and a database”

“It will make your life easier, simpler, will perform magic to save you writing a whole heap of code to communicate with your database”

It was like listening to an old TV ad for some housewives dream product. We all couldn’t wait to adopt this magic and see it for ourselves in action, you could almost smell the anticipation!

How wrong were we?! Well fast forward to the present and I can see the magic, I have even mastered some of it myself, but on wednesday this was not the case, the magic was a curse that we couldn’t find the anti-spell for. There were so many files open at once, relying on each other in ways you couldn’t see and it seemed far too much to pore over in one day.

Active Record to put it simply creates oft-used methods for accessing databases, it even reads the file names and links that to the contents of the file and then makes columns from those names and contents in a table of the database-awesome once you wrap your head around the concepts.

To give one last analogy (from wikipedia) to my first bad day at EDA:

“The captain goes down with the ship" is the maritime concept and tradition that a  sea captain holds ultimate responsibility for both his ship and everyone embarked on it, and he will die trying to save either of them.

It was as if we were each the the proud captain of our own ships which were fast sinking.

Ok so we all survived and the storm subsided, we were next met by a repeat of the content from wednesday on thursday but by now we had had the time to absorb the newfound information and could implement it safely ourselves. A big shout out to Samson our Ruby tutor who also had a bit of a hellish day dealing with 7 sinking ships!

Other things that have crossed my mind this week: Every now and then I have a brief look back at the work we have done so far and am constantly amazed at how much easier everything seems to be, even pairing seems easier now. This I think is reflected in our group projects each week, this week of course we mainly aimed to showcase our new skills in the database domain and all three groups succeeded in this, thus proving that although wednesday may have been living hell, we actually learnt so much from it. Each person at the start of a group project ideally outlines their learning objectives for the challenge, this potentially guides the course of the project and solidifies individuals understandings. My team managed to create a leader board of players and games, keeping a record of individual score for each player and game.

The knowledge of a party on friday gave me the excuse to ‘write off’ studying on saturday in my head (not something I normally let myself do), and so far- at 4.30pm- I have managed a CODE-FREE-DAY and a computer-free-day excluding writing this blog. I’m not sure how long I can survive code free, 24 hours seems pretty hard, maybe I’ll just read some code this evening…I’m sure that doesn’t count as coding!

I'll be spending tomorrow preparing my L plates for the motorway...

[amelialaundy]

Dev_Academy_week_two's MVP: SQL

Week two @ EDA in numbers:

over 20% of bootcamp is behind us

less than 7 weeks until graduation

11+ new friends made

65 hours of code 

1 group project accomplished 

At EDA we receive our daily tasks via GitHub pages, (GitHub is a site that hosts repositories mainly used by programmers to collectively work on the same project simultaneously and then merge all collaborators changes into the final project, for more info click here) and after each days (LONG) list of challenges/tasks to do there is a quote. These are often by a prominent computer scientist, of the quotes this week this one particularly stood out for me and seemed very relevant to our current position in this 9 week journey:

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

-- Alan Kay

I feel so busy here at Dev Academy that I don't really have time to think about the future, let alone worry about it, but we all know that each of us have fleeting moments where we question what will happen in 7 weeks time. Alan Kay's quote seems a succinct way to sum up what we are all achieving at bootcamp: a path to our own future and the ability to pave and shape that path for ourselves.

One week on and I feel even more confident that my choice to jump on this rocket ship was and possibly will always be the best one I ever have made. Everyday that passes I can see more and more opportunity to strengthen and grow my skill set whilst setting bonds with an amazing spread of individuals.

A highlight for me and many others this week was our first group project; we were put into groups and told to use all and any of the knowledge we have accrued so far and build something-anything! Creating something starting with an idea on a whiteboard through to a working application followed by a 10 minute presentation all within 8 hours was incredibly rewarding and the perfect way to learn, teach and bring together our learnings to date. My team managed to build a flashcard application that tests the user on true or false questions drawn from a database at random.

This week we have worked on strengthening our fundamentals in our chosen language stream (C# or Ruby-Ruby being my choice) with both streams focusing on Object Oriented Programming including the idea of MVP-minimum viable product-not most valuable player-and using the MVC pattern to create to-do list applications, hospital employee access applications and even Orange Trees that age, die and grow oranges-some trees bearing 200 fruits with diameters of 5 inches...the instructions didn't exactly say they had to be true to real life!

In phase zero we briefly covered SQL (Structured Query Language), which is used to access databases, so week two involved getting back in touch with this seemingly dark art of grabbing some data related to some other data from some database where there is some requirement...I'm probably underselling the usefulness of SQL, it is the main language used to access databases in software such as Microsoft Access, and is actually fairly simply to use and very powerful. Personally I struggled to engage with this area of study as it seemed so starkly small, restricted and different from my first love Ruby. This was until I discovered the art and joy of mixing Ruby and SQL together, like brain and brawn, I could utilise the beauty of Ruby with the pragmatic usability of SQL and so ended up creating and looking after our database in the group project...I hear database administrators get paid pretty well!

One more thing I must mention was the insightful thursday night tech talk we had from the Great Spotted Kiwis or GSKs (once again all are welcome to join us at EDA for the talks every thursday night whilst there is a cohort attending, check it out here). They were the first cohort to graduate from EDA a month or so ago and allowed us to grill them on their time at bootcamp, how they survived, what the hardest things about bootcamp were and what they're doing now. Ok so I lied, another thing to mention here: in this weeks EE session we came face to face with our inner critic, or superego, and had to vocalise to our pair what kind of things this critic says to us when things might be difficult, it was very interesting to hear so many similar inner critics across the cohort. So on hearing the positive feedback from the GSKs and how many of them are employed already I think most of us from the Kereru cohort put their inner critics to rest, at least for one night, and the general thing to come out of the evening was just don't worry about it.

In summation I feel I have found my 'thing' in life and I honestly can't describe the inner (and apparently outer) elation I have every day, I would happily do this all day everyday until the cows came home and even after they're home! The last two weeks have been the most engaging, enjoyable, challenging and incredible two weeks ever and I just hope the next seven won't fly by as fast as these two have!

This weeks Most Valuable Player most certainly and unexpectedly goes to SQL with whom I had a wobbly start but I foresee we will have a lasting and stable, though possibly long distance, relationship.

[amelialaundy]

week_one.EDA(["Wellington", "Nz])

Wow!

Week one at Enspiral Dev Academy is done...how does this feel?! I have this running app that at the end of each run it asks you to choose from various icons in response to questions, one of the questions is along the lines of "how did that run make you feel?" and then gives you some emoticons to choose from, ranging from big sad knackered face to big fat happy face; In terms of using this to describe how I feel about this week long marathon at EDA, I would choose the big fat happy face, with a knackered brain emoticon!

I can honestly say that I have never been happier, and the fact that I can say that awesome statement and mean it makes it all the more awesome and me all the more happier!

Aside from feeling so mentally positive I am knackered, and in so many senses of the word. My brain is exhilarated from being exercised so intensely, I have met and got to know 14+ other people which is a lot of information to store, but also weirdly my body is tired, I have probably never eaten so much whilst doing so little physical activity, using your brain == using lots of energy, kind of like a baby that doesn't move anywhere fast but eats and eats and poops and poops and eats and eats and then grows and grows...

On that note I am growing so much as an individual, on one level my code has become unbelievably better between monday morning and friday evening, yesterday (saturday) I sat down and looked at some of mondays code and I could rewrite it in a shorter and better way in around 10 minutes, compared to that original piece of work taking me a few hours. On another level I feel I'm growing my personality and my ability to further understand how and why people say and do things.

To explain this a little further I'll briefly run through Engineering Empathy or EE as we refer to it; EE is the process of working with others in a way that promotes a safe environment where we can be open, accepted and fearless of our words and actions. You also learn how to control you actions/reactions to experiences whether they be positive or negative, a kind of empathy awareness I guess.

An example of one of this week's EE sessions: We were told to find a person in the room we knew the least, sit next to them and then tell them what you think their favourite music genre is, what their favourite movie is, what their pet peeve is and finally their worst fear. They then had to do the same back to you, and lastly we got to discuss what the reality of the questions were.

This is damn hard! You can't help but feel you are going to have to stereotype them based on age, gender, culture, appearance mixed with what little you've learned about them so far. The process of doing this really shows that no matter how consciously we think we don't have/act/think upon stereotypes, we all have some sort of subconscious stereotype, a stereotype "radar" I would call it where we lean on these when we have no firm information to work with.

If you'd like to get a more in depth and probably a better explanation check out this video this is from Dev Bootcamp in the USA from which EDA have licensed our curriculum from.

Well lastly I will say that this definitely is a bootcamp, if you're considering taking part in EDA I can't possibly convey how much of a great program it already is and will only continue to improve with each cohort that enters. I plan to keep this blog up once a week for the 9 week duration of EDA so pop back for more updates, or head to EDA's page and they have a few links in their blogs to some of the first cohort's blogs who just graduated within the last month and our thursday night talks where anyone is welcome to come to. I'd better jump back on the code for the night :)