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[codersource-blog]

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[cdemiranda]

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[366daystosuccess-blog]

I got accepted.

Do you ever feel like you wanted to do something and when you do it you feel happy but then it goes away? And you start to question yourself? 

Tuesday, 8pm, 21 April 2015 - I got accepted into Enspiral DevAcademy, which is a 9 week software development bootcamp with an average of 100 hours of coding per week. Sounds intense, cause it is.

About 4 pm, that day, I am still at work and I receive an email that I will be having an interview. I was like “F*ck yeah! Bring it on.” However, me being me, I did no preparation. 

My intuition was telling me that I should at least make a list of questions. So I did. In last minute, I decide to make 5 bullet points of questions I would like to ask. 

It is 8pm, I receive a call, right on the dot. Punctuality...I like that in a man. He introduces himself as Rohan. We start chatting. 

As it turns out, the interview was more about me asking the questions, rather than him asking me. Well, that is interesting, I think to myself. Not to worry, I got this covered with my 5 bullet points.  

I try to think on the spot, as to how I should formulate the questions, and I manage to do that but turns out my quick thinking is not as good as I thought it would be. 

I end up jumping from question to question, following no logic. One moment, I am asking about the languages taught and the next, I am talking about start-ups. 

In the end, we end up having a nice conversation, where I am fascinated by Rohan’ sales skills. I must learn from him. Hopefully I will learn some sales skills. He will be my mentor, he just doesn’t know it yet. 

I accept the offer. 

I should be excited, with the fact that I am changing my life for better. I am doing what I wanted to do for a while.  However, my feelings are mixed. 

On one side, I am and looking forward to starting this journey. The knowledge, the people, the experience and the opportunities that I will get from it are priceless. 

On another, I am questioning whether it is the right decision. I feel that I am afraid to end up where I ended up before...working for someone else, achieving their dreams and not mine. 

Of course, I will need to make money to pay for rent & food. My plan is while I study continue making games with my team and when I graduate, get a part-time job in the tech industry. 

I must make sure I follow my own path. 

The path to success. 

[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…

[chronicdi-blog]

Rhythm and Blues @ EDA

0440/4.40/4hrs and 40 min am…

The sleep cycle alarm on my phone starts up. It fades in and out trying to pull me out of sleep, I reach out and toss it a foot in the air to the bottom of the bed. The accelerometer kicks in and puts it on snooze, at least for 2 minutes then it starts its rhythmic insistence that i rise from my slumber.

This is the start of my day at Enspiral Dev Academy.

After meandering in and out of the shower I assemble a bowl of three Oatbix (they are so much better then normal Wheatbix!) to the tune of the ugly thrumming sound omitted from my espresso machine as it ever so slowly drips out the black cure to my droopy eyed demeanor.

At about 5.30 with coffee and breakfast in hand I jump in the car and drive into Wellington City, heading for the end of Oriental Parade where I plan to park the car. As I drive in I am always struck by how few cars there are on the road, I know people think it is horribly early, but i would of thought there would be more people that like myself hate traffic and rush hour more.

By 6.00 I am at the end of the Parade where the Coupon Parking zone ends and it becomes free parking. I park the car, wind down the window, tune in to New Zealand National Radio with the volume nice and loud. I jump out the car feeling good because I now get to eat my Oatbix and drink my coffee while overlooking Wellington Harbour across to Eastbourne in the East while the morning sun has yet to make an appearance but plays with colours of the sky.

6.15ish I open the boot and pull out my folding bicycle and make my way to the academy, a very easy 15 minute ride around the esplanade and past TePapa Museum.

By 6.45 I have arrived at the academy, I have about one and a half hours until everyone arrives. I spend the first 15 minutes learning to play an Irish Bodrhan that was on a shelf of the academy, I have learned two beats so far and hope to be able to play more musically by the end of the coarse. Next I sit and practice mindfulness meditation for 10 minutes, after which its coffee time and I have about an hour remaining.

I spend the next hour reviewing the previous days work, looking over the current days challenges or reading up on different concepts I am learning.

By 8.45 everyone has arrived and we hear a light gong sound signifying it is time to check-in with your coarse accountability buddies. There are many different groups we break into on any given day for learning, but your buddy group is the most constant.

After the buddy check-in the gong sounds again and we all make our way into a side room for our first lecture of the day.

After this the day flies - we learn so much and practice even more. We are constantly trying new things and just when you think you have a handle on something the next “thing” to learn and try appears, as if conjured by an evil omnipresence(not pointing any fingers) that will not let you rest.

We break for a long lunch but I often find I am drawn back to the computer to carry on learning. Some days we also have a yoga class just before, which is great! I definitely feel looser, before I came on to the coarse I was concerned with getting a sore back from all thesitting. But thanks to the yoga and cycling every day this has not happened.

14.00 the gong sounds and we have our afternoon lecture. In the first week I found my energy levels dropping off at about this point. However by the second week this was no longer a problem.

18.00 marks the end to the day. The coaches go home and in come a couple of tutors to help you in the evening. These are often previous students who know what it is you are going through and provide a different perspective (one closer to your own) from the coaches.

I continue to work on the days challenges or read until about 21.00 at which point I pack up, I make my way home and find I am typically in the kitchen scrounging for food at about 21.30.

22.00 The day ends as I meander from the shower back to bed and go to sleep ready for the new day.

For myself this rhythem is only sustainable as long as I have a good rest on the weekend. More than anything I am happy, everyone of us needs to work on our rhythem so as to maximise our learning environment. Mine focuses on rising earlier and having an absolute time I work until. During the day you pace yourself and take many breaks, at the moment they are for tea, honey, ginger and lemon drinks for the winter blues.

[askslatey-socs]

Item: Magic Story Book

Description: Worn magic book that you found up on teh topmost shelf. You open it only to see the story fade away and rather startling words crossing it in big, ink blotched splatters.

((Seriously. You'll think its all innocent, maybe be curious, lift that book off the shelf, open it up, but the words will fade away and the book will F*** YOU UP WITH WORDS! You argue back, it just gets worse. Insults, cuss words, lots of messed up stuff til you GO AWAY. Though if you can get the thing to calm down you might get it to actually tell you the actual stories instead of trolling you by making the words vanish at all the good points or altering it with lots of swears.))

[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.

[devacademy]

Tutorial Laravel: Migraciones para el manejo de la BD by @jlinformatico

Hola estimados developers, en el anterior capítulo hablamos sobre cómo configurar nuestra base de datos en nuestro primer proyecto Laravel 4, puedes verlo en el siguiente enlace: http://blog.devacademy.la/post/97937907471/tutorial-laravel-base-de-datos-y-orm-eloquent-by Ahora vamos a realizar migraciones en Laravel 4, seguimos con nuestro proyecto devacademy-laravel, emocionad@?!!, continuemos.

Migraciones Al crear tu base de datos, podrías escribir algo de SQL  para describir tus columnas, pero ¿qué pasa si por error borras la base de datos? ¿Qué pasa si trabajas en equipo? No tienes que estar pasando las exportaciones de la base de datos para mantener la base  de datos sincronizada. Aquí es cuando las migraciones prueban ser útiles. Son un número de scripts PHP que son usados  para cambiar la estructura y/o contenido de tu base de datos. Las migraciones tienen una fecha y hora marcadas por lo que se ejecutan siempre en el orden correcto. Laravel mantiene un registro de qué migraciones ha ejecutado. De esta forma, solo ejecutará las  migraciones adicionales que hayan podido ser añadidas.  Usando migraciones, tanto tú como tu equipo tendrán siempre la misma estructura de la base de datos, de manera consistente y estable.

Creando migraciones Para crear una migración tenemos que usar la interfaz de línea de comandos Artisan. Ve y abre una  ventana del terminal y dirígete a la carpeta del proyecto. Aprendimos cómo crear esquemas en el  capítulo anterior; pues ese esquema vamos a utilizarlo aquí. Vamos a recrear la construcción del esquema para crear la tabla de usuarios. Comenzaremos usando Artisan para crear una migración  llamada create_users. Vamos a la terminal: $ php artisan migrate:make create_users

Llamamos al método de Artisan, migrate:make y le damos un nombre a nuestra migración. Laravel  habrá generado una plantilla de migración en el directorio app/database/migrations. La plantilla  estará ubicada en un fichero nombrado con el parámetro que le has dado al parámetro migrate:make, con una fecha y hora añadidas. Es fácil de recordar, ¿verdad?, si deseas repasar sobre el directorio de laravel puedes ingresar aqui: http://blog.devacademy.la/post/95503250161/tutorial-laravel-conociendo-la-estructura-de-un. En este caso, nuestra plantilla está ubicada en el siguiente archivo: app/database/migrations/2014_09_26_230530_create_users.php Abrimos este archivo:

Aquí tenemos nuestra clase de migración. Es importante que uses siempre comandos de Artisan  para generar migraciones, no te arriesgues a romper las fechas y horas y por tanto la estructura de  tu base de datos. En la clase de migración, tenemos dos métodos públicos up() y down(). Lo que sea que hagas en el método up() debes  deshacerlo en el método down(). Como ves, las migraciones son bi-direccionales. Podemos ejecutar  una migración para actualizar la estructura o contenido de nuestra base de datos, pero también  podemos deshacer la migración para devolverla a su estado original. Primero, vamos a insertar código a ambos métodos.

Ejecutando migraciones Vamos a preparar la base de datos para usar migraciones.  La configuración está ubicada en app/config/database.php. Asegurate de esto: 'migrations' => 'migrations', Simplemente cambia el índice migrations al nombre de la tabla que quieres usar para registrar el  estado de tus migraciones. Como ves, ya hay un valor por defecto. Ahora si ejecutamos desde la terminal: $ php artisan migrate:install y wala!! ya tienes tu tabla users en tu bd!!. En el próximo capítulo aprenderás sobre los modelos y relaciones en ORM Eloquent Saludos! By @jlinformatico

[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]

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...

[chronicdi-blog]

Week one @ Enspiral Dev Academy [The Boot Camp Edition]

Looking back over the last week is a little scary, we did so many things and i learned a many new things. It makes me a little dizzy trying to remember everything! The reality is I know i can't and that is why reflecting upon it is so important. The other very apparent theme of the last week has been how energized I feel, sometimes its tiring when you are in the trenches of a new coding problem, but then you peak up and out see the other students constructive energy crackling in the air. I feel it keenly, a hunger for knowing, understanding and driving towards a solution.

Another very obvious quality of the learning environment is how collaborative it is, there is no holding back of knowledge or input, if you can aid some one in their understanding you do so and you expect and rely on that same support from others. This is in stark contrast of the learning environments i have been through at university and before that my schooling. Yesterday i was speaking with another student listening to how he was tackling a problem and and giving my opinion on different parts, by comparison back in 6th form (age 17) I have a clear memory of choosing not to help a student next to me in math as it would mean they would get a lesser grade and i would be more likely to get a good grade (schools were allocated a certain number of each grade level to hand out). I have regretted that moment ever since and have tried to never repeat it. Here at EDA i dont even have to think about it, I can help and be helped as much as I can/need.

At EDA i feel very balanced, there is a very conscious emphasis placed on creating a balanced environment, the students and coaches are all encouraged (and do) to eat well, exercise, understand ourselves, understand others, create the space we need to learn, ask questions, sleep and feel good. I can report - it works! For the last few years i have been learning working with designing and coding websites. I quickly realised there was a glass ceiling for what i could learn. I spent hours trying to understand a given concept where as here at EDA it is situation that simply cannot occur, firstly you may discuss it with fellow students and if that does not resolve it you may ask your coach. This dual layer support for answering questions allows me to maintain a far higher rate of learnings per hour then previously possible.

This week also introduced Engineering Empathy, a new approach to investigating ourselves and how we perceive and react to others. In one of the classes Joshua Vial (one of our coaches) roughly said "One of things we are trying to do is reconcile our conscious beliefs with our unconscious behaviors", which may be applied our singular self or to a group we belong to. eg. Our family. For me this summarizes the EE studies of this week which has been focused on diversity, however I think it can be applied in a broader context.

The final challenge of the week was to write a Sudoku solver, this was fantastic! I got to take all I had learned in the week and apply it in to make a algorithm solver. My pair buddy Linden and I worked through the challenge making mistakes and melding our ideas to produce something that worked! Well at least for Sudoku that didn't require guessing. It was so rewarding to see that our logic worked, though midway through we already knew we were on the right track and it was just a matter of diligently debugging. A skill I plan to spend time honing.

Its now Monday of week two and we are just kicking off the day. I am feeling good and looking forward to learning, growing and making friends.

[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.

[devacademy]

Taller de Fundamentos de Programación con Ruby

DevAcademy ofreció un Taller gratuito de Fundamentos de Programación con Ruby, desde el 25 de febrero hasta el 6 de marzo.

En esta oportunidad el taller fue orientado a las chicas, como preparación para la segunda edición del Rails Girls Ica. El taller estuvo dividido en 4 sesiones presenciales que se llevaron acabo los días 25, 27 de Febrero y 4, 6 de Marzo.

En estas sesiones se tocaron temas básicos de programación. Los conceptos de programación fueron genéricos y aplicables a cualquier lenguaje. Los ejemplos y ejercicios prácticos se realizaron con el lenguaje de programación Ruby.

También hubo premios para las chicas que participaron activamente en el taller y cumplieron los retos asignados en estos 4 días.

Por @ervelasquez