@idlehands' Dev Bootcamp Adventure

[1dlehands]

Advice to Boots looking for work.

I'm getting hit up pretty regularly these days by graduates of Dev Bootcamp trying to land their first job. I will probably move this somewhere else later, but it was the fastest place for me to get it up. This is the quick version of my advice. I'll try to elaborate more on it soon.

I'm sure I am getting hit up because I was the first Boot to land a solid job with a company in the Denver Boulder area. The only one that preceded me actually got accepted to Tech Stars, which is super awesome, but doesn't leave him in the position to be giving job advice.

1. You want to get a job working full time as a developer? Landing that job is your new job. I don't care what the situation is, plan to spend at least 40 hours a week on finding work and keeping your skills up. Don't go too crazy beyond that as it needs to be sustainable. It took me 3 months after leaving DBC to land a job at SendGrid, but it was totally worth the time and effort.

So, you're spending 40 hours a week; make sure at least half of it is spent learning/coding and at least half is spent networking. Go to every meetup under the sun. Take people out to coffee who you seem to have common interests, even if they don't have a direct connection for you. Volunteer to help organize and run events.

Learning and networking are equally important. I find that when I give that advise, people tend to do more of whichever they are more comfortable with. That won't be as effective.

As far as the learning goes, start a project that you care about. Invariably, it will force you to learn something outside of vanilla Rails and that will be VERY helpful. More importantly, it will give you something to talk about in interviews. Even if your code isn't amazing, writing something that works and you can talk about will leave you leaps and bounds ahead of someone who has just gone through a lot of tutorials. No one wants to review the code for your Hartl blog, BUT...

2. Make sure you're comfortable test driving your code the way that the Hartl tutorial does it. There are plenty of styles out there, but I've found that most are a variation of his flow with capybara and rspec.

3. Don't turn down any interview and don't be picky about who you apply to. A company's product is absolutely second fiddle to the culture and the people you will work with. The common joke about me at work is that I suck at email and I am not particularly fond of it. But I do love my company culture and the team I work on and wouldn't trade them for the sexiest product under the sun. Email is not sexy. Job happiness is.

On top of possibly missing an opportunity to land the perfect job, think of every interview you can get as an opportunity to practice for ones that really matter.

4. Prepare your significant other for how long the job hunt can take. You are suddenly more marketable and you can find work, but it isn't easy. Get buy in that it could be a 1-6 month process and that you are going to be busting your ass during the whole time and won't be available in the middle of the day to do non-job-hunt related things. Remember, this is your job, get buy-in from the people who matter. Dealing with undo pressure from people in your life makes the whole thing harder.

5. Remember that the whole thing is a roller-coaster. I had a solid verbal offer that was a dream job (working as a client of Pivotal Labs, pairing with Pivots, all day long) and I accepted, only to have the non-technical CEO personally rescind my offer because she couldn't get over my experience. BUT, I met some awesome people through that process, and even though they could help me find a job, I would be surprised if in the future, either I help them into a new position, or they help me. And besides, I'm actually happier to be where I am now than if that job had worked out.

6. Engineering empathy is your special sauce. I'm not kidding. Up until now, this advice could apply across the board to any graduate of any developer school. But engineering empathy makes you a Big Mac. Learn to play it up, to use your new communication skills to wow people with your honesty and your ability to take feedback like no other. Every company is now getting hit up left and right by coding school grads. Your bad ass coding skills aren't... well, bad ass. They aren't going to blow anyone's mind. But being technically competent on top of being someone that people want to work with is your best way to get your foot in the door. I still stand 100% by my quote on the DBC alumni page.

So, set your expectations. Believe it or not, getting through Dev Bootcamp may end up being the easiest part of your transition, but you did make it. And if you survived that insane schedule without your brain frying, you can tackle this next phase.

Also, SendGrid is not looking for jr devs right now. I'm sorry about that. Trust me, I really am. You can hit me up for advice, but please don't hit me up for help getting your foot in the door. I'm wearing my welcome thin in the HR department.

Oh, and don't apply to Pivotal Labs unless you're damn sure you're ready. It's not always talked about openly, but there is definitely a LONG waiting period to re-apply if you don't make it the first time. Yup. There are boots that have made it, but most of them had some significant programming experience before they showed up at DBC. Take your time. They'll be around when you're ready.

Good luck!

[1dlehands]

.i need some input.

Hey, big brother,

I'm working in the evenings on the Xylotones.com. Going by advice from one of our smartiest DBC staff and a boot who spent the last 7 years running and maintaining databases (in London), I originally made every dot on every instance of Xylotone a new, indexed row in the database. It took all of an hour to blow through Heroku's 'dev' account db row limit of 10K. 

For the record, the reason for going this approach is that each dot needs to be able to be updated individually. When you select some to remove and hit 'save,' I run a jQuery search for all dots that have been 'deleted' in the browser and send an Ajax PUT with their ids back to the rails app. It then pulls the individual dots and updates their delete_status, a boolean.

I've since re-written everything and instead and storing the data as a cdv on S3. Every time you do anything, it has to pull the csv, parse the info into a nested array, and then correct the array at the index spot correlating to the dot id. It doesn't seem to slow the process down much, as is quicker during the creation (my biggest issue right now) so I'm running with it. The thing is that I've already give a bunch of people that I met with on Friday (our big interview day) the link to the xylotones that I made of them (some were very impressed, others not at all). So I'm writing a migration that will run through the db and convert everything over… 

Ha! I just  figured out the answer to my question. I was concerned about losing the data when I migrate everything to the csv file, but, duh, I just won't delete the dots in that migration. If everything works, great! I can just write a second migration that kills the dots. 

I'm not sure what implications that has for the down migrations, though. Any advice?

Thanks in advance, big brother!

Also, BTW,  448,435 dots as I write this. Woohoo!

Jeffrey

[1dlehands]

.a little distraction.

Landing Pad2

Created with cinemagr.am

[1dlehands]

.group project.

Just checking in really quickly. It's 12:15am and we have a group project due tomorrow at 9am. It's been... a learning experience. I'll try to write more when I have had some sleep.

[1dlehands]

.my last two days in summary.

I am meeting with Kevin, the newest member of furnlab and the guy making the woodifi iphone skins, tomorrow morning at 7:30 to go over some stuff and get some samples of the first trial production run. I will make this update brief.

The last two days:

learning to love rspec and TDD (test-driven design) — I'm almost there.

I've started reading Practical Object-Oriented Design in Ruby by Sandi Metz — so far it's good, but I'm a very slow reader.

Aaron Batalion, co-founder of Living Social, spoke last night at DBC — it was very interesting to see how a very metric driven company works and to better understand their goals.

We spent the morning going through 4 rounds of pairing on the same project (and tossing the code afterwards) — it was fun, challenging, tiring, good. Also, I got to work with Andrew Fowler but 40 minutes wasn't enough. I look forward to working with him on a real challenge/project.

I've started learning database layout.

I started pairing with Drew Kitch for my/our first truly test driven development and so far, it's been a really good experience.

Tomorrow, I plan to survive yoga and then knock out the rest of the project I'm working with Drew on. That will lay the foundation of tdd in preparation for next week's group projects —which I am REALLY excited about. Databases seem pretty interesting. I also feel some pressure to get into JavaScript so that I can start a foundation of understanding. There are some things that I would like to achieve for furnlab that will require that. Perhaps I won't try to include that with tomorrow's activities.

Good night.

[1dlehands]

It was really good to just take the weekend off to be with my family. I did work a little and got Kevin, my new contract employee, all set for his first production run of iPhone skins. I also announced to our waiting list that they are available for pre-order. Aside from that, my focus was on Noe, Amy, and realizing how unfriendly San Francisco can be to traveling with a toddler. A wake up call at 4am to get Amy and Noe to the airport left me a little in a pretty laggy start-up condition for the morning. Yoga nearly killed me (at least I didn't say "literally"). It took a while to get back into "maker time," where my focus was just on coding. Once I got there, though, I started to be productive. I'm working in Rspec and test driven design, and, like usual, the concept is readily available to me but I have to out in my time learning the syntax. I'm working with Mike Casey again, and it's fun to see how much we've learned since we last worked together two weeks ago. I had a very positive email exchange with Roy Bahat of Ouya. I thanked him for coming in to speak last week and explained how the experience both help me to feel good about the Dev Bootcamp approach and also to see Ouya in a different light. I had thought of them as a big bully using Kickstarter as a PR tool. After hearing him speak, it was obvious that their whole experience was just like a (really largely) scaled version of mine. I walked away enthusiastic that the VC system isn't the only way to get a product off the ground. So, my brain is rebooted, my business is rebooted, and my capacity for learning has wound back up. The day could have been more productive, but, all in all, I'd call it a win. Well, except that part where I had to say goodbye to Amy and Noe, but it was so long ago it doesn't even feel like the same day. Time for my beauty sleep.

[asadsn23rdsksasd-deactivated201]

What some questions probably feel like to DBC teachers.

Perspective boots, please note that staff here NEVER acts like this. This is just a compilation clip from a pretty sweet show. (note that season 1 is on average way better than season 2).

Fun fun fun! (per Shereef B’s proclamation)

[1dlehands]

.cpu overheat.

I haven't written for a few days. My goals have been lofty, perhaps a little out if my reach. I have been intending to:

• Maintain a high pace at Dev Bootcamp. • Write something interesting on Tumblr everyday. • Write on 750words.com every day. • Take all the necessary steps to get FurnLab's wood iPhone skins back into production, rebranded, and with new retail packaging (that I need to design). • Keep my loved ones apprised of my progress and well-being.

I'm sure there is more.

So far, I have: - Maintained a high pace at Dev Bootcamp. - Inconsistently written content of inconsistent quality on Tumblr about 40% of the days. - Written on 750words.com 3 the last 10 days. - Almost gotten FurnLab back into production, without any new branding or packaging. - Kept my wife and daughter apprised of my well-being.

My week-shy-of-4-years-old Unibody MacBook Pro's battery waited until I got here to start having issues. It's now pretty hard to keep up and running between outlets, making doing everything require a start-up, so I'm starting to question lugging a 6-pound laptop with me everywhere I go when I'm finding myself resistant to use it. I need to find time (and $) to get a new battery.

DBC itself is going fairly well. I've spent a lot more time than I expected helping my fellow boots, especially the ones while are struggling to make the jump from procedural to Object Oriented design(OOD). It's been rewarding to see their faces at the 'ah-hah!' moment; the sudden realization of what OOD can potentially offer. It has also helped solidify my understanding, certainly a motivator to stop my forward progress and reach back to help bring another Boot forward. I sort of wish the people moving faster through the curriculum than I had the same perspective, but I'm sure ill be just fine. When I made my aim for the week, I factored in time to work with others. It's likely that the speedier boots were driven to make their aim by different motivating factors.

I covered the challenges to add features to my ToDo program (mentioned in the post of the email to my brother) with relative ease. It was rewarding to be able to expand the capabilities of the program without having to make any (significant) changes to my existing code.

I worked with Kyle Snell yesterday on learning rspec, a major complement to writing tests for Test Driven Design(TDD). It was a good experience to work with him, but since we were writing test for existing code (to help us learn the testing methods) it was pretty tough work. I look forward to working with him again, especially in a situation were we can create something together. I am getting the point of TDD, though, and so the hard work had a pay-off.

Roy Bahat, formerly if IGN and now of Ouya, speaker last night and it was AWESOME. It was incredibly encouraging to hear his excitement about our program. Honestly, I would love to work for Ouya. They're an awesome blend of software/industrial design/kickstarter funding. I don't think I was nearly as excited about the product until I realized that the people behind it went through what was basically just a larger version o the worry/fear/stress/validation/oh-crap(!) cycle that I went through with the Furnlab skins project on Kickstarter.

My wife and daughter arrive in SF for the weekend (for the one time I will get to see them while I am attending DBC). I have decided that I will try to spend as little time in the lab as possible while they're here and just let my CPU cool down a little. Then, I need to re-evaluate what this old model is really capable of and set goals that are incredibly high, but not unrealistic.

[1dlehands]

.my most complicated program yet.

Dear big brother,

https://gist.github.com/0c0456657a800b7eca1d

It’s a command line todo list. Right now, it’s a little ghetto, but I’m damn proud anyway. I wrote it all by myself (it was supposed to be a pairs challenge, but no one here was ready to do it) and except for minor sytax stuff (because I am SUPER shitty at syntax), it worked the first time I tried it. Of course, that means that I haven’t learned TDD yet, but never fear, that’s the next unit after this one (Object Oriented Design). Any feedback is totally welcome.

You have to run it by typing ruby <file_name> <command>

If you don’t have a todo list file set up, it’ll take care of it, so don’t worry about that. It will be blank, though, so you’ll need to add some todos.

The formatting is crap, but I really don’t intend to spend a whole lot of time working on a pretty interface.

I haven’t written any documentation for it, so I’ll try to do so here.

list

add <to do name>

delete <to do number>

complete <to do number>

I think that’s all it does right now. I have to add a bunch of features to it for the next challenge. Anyhow, dude, I LOVE this stuff. And Object Oriented design? Oh my fricken’ god. As soon as it clicked, I realized instantly how people claim to be able to model really complex things from life and evolve their model towards more and more realistic complexity. It’s like a whole new universe of possibilities opened up. Having never written anything besides procedural code (and the last time having been over a decade ago), I just couldn’t even begin to imagine how people could do such complex things. Turns out, it’s fifty billion times easier to organize than anything procedural (at least at the level of complication that I’m writing at).

I spent a lot of this last weekend working with a bunch of my fellow boots on the very first OO challenge that we got, a VERY simply model of an orange tree, helping them try to understand the difference between OO and breaking procedural code into a lot of little methods. I got really lucky that my mentor was here to work with me the night that I first tackled it. Having helped everyone else just really cemented everything in my head really well.

Crazy thing is that today was simultaneously the best and worst day I’ve had (at DBC. And this doesn’t include the parts where I REALLY miss my wife and daughter). I spent ALL day (from about 9am until 8pm) working on a solo project that everyone else who completed it just kind of breezed through. It was about reading/writing serialized files. Sherif Abushadi, one of the staff, found me just staring at the computer, completely overwhelmed. After talking me off the ledge, we went over some stuff and he pointed out that everything I had written was usable code and helped me figure out where I was having an issue with syntax. After he helped me ground myself, I got back to working along and (with a little insight from another staffer, Robert Fletcher) got a grasp of dealing with CSV files and YAML.

By contrast, I wrote the working todo list in about an hour. Big thanks to Jeff Smith, a fellow boot, who helped me understand ARGV to run things from the command line. Anyhow, I probably shouldn’t get too excited as I’m sure I’ll break everything when I start adding features… but maybe not.

Amy has been good about keeping me in touch with Noe via FaceTime and Kevin is helping me get FurnLab sorted out (we’ll start shipping skins early next week!) so, aside from never getting enough sleep, things are going pretty well. Also, Amy and Noe will be here this weekend. I’m super stoked about that.

Thank you again, for telling me about DBC.

Miss you!

Jeffrey

[1dlehands]

.quit coding and get back to programming.

I'm going to play with the format a bit today since I was working last night way too late to write and now I have to days to cover.

Wednesday, 10/10/12

Morning: Engineering Empathy day

We talked about feedback loops, how they facilitate learning and how broken feedback loops cause issues. Then we worked on giving our pairs from previous days feedback. I think it went over with everyone way better than last week's stuff and it was a very positive experience for me. I had two previous partners tell me that they really liked the consistent positive feedback that I give while working with them. Funny, thing, though, it that Taz said he had to stop thinking I was messing with him and accept that I really was just being positive. He owned that it was the result of what be brought to the situation. I will continue to try to remember to point out my pairs' successes when I work with them.

Mid-Morning: Nathaniel Whittemore, a professional writer/blogger started what will be several sessions with us on writing so that we can better connect with any potential audience and make writing fulfill whatever we need it to. It was interesting, but I'm more excited about doing work than sitting through the initial talk. He apologized for the "lecture" and promised that would be the last day like that. He asked us to write at 750words.com for the next week. It's a site where you just write, well, 750 words a day. It's private and the point is to flex your writing muscle. 

Afternoon-evening: I worked with Brian Lee on converting numerals into words, like 12 => "twelve" but with much larger numbers, up to a billion (or higher). I dragged out the whiteboard and we went over it a lot until we felt like we had a solution. Everything was going just fine until we looked down and realized that we were going to have to make it recursive (if it wasn't already) for a later requirement. Ours wasn't. Suddenly, we were typing and scrambling to change things. We didn't do a very good job of re-examining our process or the problem in the new light. It was more: 1.code 2.test 3.make random (not really) changes 4.test again. 

Especially given that it was starting to get late when we got to that point, I think taking a step back and pulling the whiteboard out would have saved us a lot of headache. We didn't get it done. Writing code got in the way of writing a good program.

Eventually, I called it and we went home. My brain was not functioning anywhere near where it should have been.

Thursday 10/11/12

Super early morning: First thing I did was to go to 750words.com and write. It took me about 25 minutes to write 750 words and, boy! Did I ever ramble. It's nice knowing that it's private.

Early morning: Yoga. Ugh. I say that not because I don't like it, but because it's quite hard for me, largely from a flexibility stand point, but also strength and balance. I'm glad it's mandatory or I'd probably not do it. I think I might get to like it. Check back in in a few weeks. I do really like the instructor, Brick Thornton.

Morning: Brian and I got back to work on our program. It took us until a little after lunch. It went WAY better this morning, but we were dealing with some legacy code from last night, pre-recursion, and I think it took us a while to deal with and correct its limitations. We probably should have scrapped everything, planned it out right, and started over.

There was a break out on Object Oriented Design, the basic principle behind a lot of what we are expected to do. It was interesting. I "get" the general idea, but it will be hard to break out of procedural thinking.

Lunch: I got to talk to Noe, my daughter briefly, and I got a PO box. I can now get things shipped to me. This is good.

Afternoon: After finishing the number/word issue, I reviewed a lot of fellow students' code so that they could move to their next challenges. Brian and I got started on the first of the Object Oriented challenges. It's pretty basic, but it was already getting hard to readjust the entire way of approaching, well, everything about a problem. We didn't finish, as we had a speaker arrive for our Thursday evening presenter.

Evening: The speaker tonight was TJ Murphy of Mino Monsters. Those dedicated readers of this blog ('hello!' to my lovely wife and mother!) will already know that TJ is actually a mentor of mine. (As in, one of the two mentors assigned me by DBC) He was super energetic and really seemed to capture his audience. It was cool to hear a lot more of his background and how he got to where he is, a founder of a successful iPhone game. 

After his talk and all the Q & A, he and I were talking and he realized that, because of a trip he will be on, he won't be able to work with me until early November. He offered to sit down and work with me tonight and—after I gave up trying to convince him that what I was working on was so basic that it wasn't worth his time—we sat down and went through the challenge that Brian and I are currently working on. He was pretty awesome at letting me stumble and not answering questions if he thought I would do better to figure things out on my own. When Brian finished his (really late) dinner, he joined us, which was great. So we stumbled through our first truly object oriented program with a benevolent benefactor looking over our shoulders. It was pretty cool.

After that, my mind was fried. TJ went to find a VERY late dinner (around 10pm) and Brian, who coincidentally lives half a block away from me, and I walked home. I caught a little of the VP debate that my roommate had on the DVR, and came to write this. 

I am on track to meet the goals I had set up on Tuesday. I hope I can surpass them, but hitting them will be good, too.

[1dlehands]

.keep your head down and code.

I'm making this quick because I already wrote the whole post out on the tumblr app on the iphone and lost it somehow. It's really too bad that there isan't a way to save a draft on tumblr.

We started the day by making individual goals for where in the curriculum we would be by Monday. I think this will help drive focus. 

I worked with Kari Weiler, Nima, and Gene Bang today. We got a lot of work done. Additionally, I managed to fit in several code reviews so that fellow boots could progress. I hope that the favor is returned down the road. 

I found, again, that if a problem seems complicated, the white board is my best friend. Simply running through and algorithm with different cases helps find errors before you have to search through your code to find them.

It was a productive day. I'm tired, but feel a strong sense of accomplishment. Tomorrow starts with Engineering Empathy" ("touchy feely Wedenesday"). I'm not excited about it, but I'm sure it will be just fine and that I'll learn something from it.

[1dlehands]

.and a good time was had by all.

I have two things to cover about today. The first is working with Scott Chiang on some challenges, the second is that we met our mentors tonight.

Scott and I haven't worked together before and now, so I wasn't sure how it would go. We had to write a method to count the word frequencies in a file. It went well. We both learned from each other and it didn't take a whole lot of time. 

The next challenge we took on was to explore defining classes by writing a program to accurately score bowling with a turn by turn accurate score. We've had the advantage of seeing our fellow boots struggling, so I really pushed that we figure out how we would resolve everything before we started to code. We spent about 2 hours scratching at the whiteboard and discussing not only how we would approach the scoring algorithm, but mapping our classes, methods, and running through our logic several times. 

Yup. ^^^ That's my awesome chicken scratch ^^^

So, yeah. Those images are the culmination of a couple of hours of work. But we have an algorithm that seems to be robust and we're ready to write this sucker. We got started a little bit, but we hit 6pm and, while normally we would just keep working, tonight was special. Tonight, at 6:30, we got to meet our mentors. 

I was assigned two mentors, and am to meet with one every other week. I had been given their names late last week, but aside from online profiles, I didn't really know what to expect. I think I lucked out. They are both very interesting and very different.

TJ Murphy is the co-founder of a Y-combinator incubated iOS app, MinoMonsters, that focuses on collecting monsters and having them do battle. Sound familiar? I have no idea what you're talking about. Anyhow, TJ is very energetic and is super excited to meet me at DBC when we get together so that he can pair with me and help me work on whatever I have on my plate. He says MinoMonsters' backend is mostly Ruby, though, of course, the front end it objective-C. I'm excited about that, because I have been interested in Objective-C for a while. I was working through the Big Nerd Ranch book on it before I came to the realization that 45 minutes, 3 nights a week just wasn't going to cut it and couldn't do anything about it with my current life/job structure at the time.

Peter Ehrlich is a free-lance programmer of whom I have heard amazing stories of coding prowess. He and TJ seem to come to things from completely different backgrounds and I look forward to working with both of them. 

Overall, the night went well. I got a chance to meet some other mentors as well and it was a good crowd. The event was scheduled to run until 8, but when I left at 9:30 or so, there were still plenty of people hanging around. I think that this is an aspect of Dev Bootcamp that I'm very excited about. (Not that there are really many things that I'm not excited about.)

[1dlehands]

.at least it was a good learning experience.

.well, at least it was a good learning experience.

I haven’t posted since Thursday for two reasons:

I have been busting my hind end until too late each night to blog

I needed to separate myself from my experience Friday before I could write about it

It’s after 1am now, but I just got home from the lab and I feel I need to talk about my learning experience on Friday before I have too many new experiences push it from my memory. Don’t worry, it wasn’t all bad.

Friday found me paired with another Boot that I have gotten along with very well all week. He’s a super nice guy and we have a lot in common. So, it seemed like a great idea to tackle a challenge or two with him. 

We started working on writing a method to convert an arabic number, from 1 to 3000, to Roman Numerals. First we had to do it the old way, which is just additive (4 would be IIII) and then we had to change it to be subtractive, modern style (4 would be IV). I had thought a bit about it before we started working and presented my thoughts. I felt like I wasn’t being listened to and immediately, my pair offered a different approach.  I realized that we were two opinionated people and thought it might be good for me to relax and be open to someone else’ approach. 

We talked about the differences, but, again, I felt that I wasn’t being listened to. We started to work a little bit on our own and then compared where we were. Turns out that my pair’s approach was simpler than mine. So, I helped him clean it up and get it running. Turns out that neither of us has syntax down completely, but we got through it. It was probably the best thing I could go through to help drive home some of the small syntax swaps that my mind likes to make.

Our solution for the first part was clean and simple. 

Time to move on to the second part. Immediately, we had disagreements. I suggested we start by reading and re-writing the rules of the new Roman numerals. Before we even got through, my pair was suggesting some complicated IF/THEN/ELSE statements. I put out there that I felt that was an inelegant way to do it and that we should try to simplify things. It was not well-received feedback.  Effectively, he started working on his own code while I played around with trying to find a simpler solution. 

At some point, I was presented with a complex system of IF/THENS to parse the output of our previous method. I stated again that I felt there needed to be a simpler way, thinking that maybe there was some sort of way to use an array to simplify things, but I hadn’t figured out the magical better solution yet. My pair continued to insist that the method wasn’t that complicated. 

I made a conscious decision to support his idea and try it out, despite not liking it, so see where it would go. Perhaps I was irritated that I hadn’t solved the riddle and was throwing unnecessary resistance into the mix. I quit looking for “a better way” and just went with it. 

Including a pause or two for breakout sessions (impromptu lectures) it took us several hours to get the code to where we thought it should be working… and yet it didn’t. We finally asked an instructor for help. Jesse Farmer took a look at our code and basically said that he really didn’t want to have to read through it, that surely there was a better way. Having made a commitment to give my pair’s code my all, I tried to defend it, but, honestly, explaining it was pretty hard. Then Jesse typed one little key pair on the screen as a hint and I immediately saw that there was “a better way.” I started laughing. 

I showed my pair what I had just understood and he looked bowled over. To his credit, he said, “I guess I got married to my solution.” It took us about 3 minutes to change our original method to accomodate for the modern Roman numeral notation. 

I was an odd mixture of angry and relieved. I really wanted to yell, “I told you so!!!!” but that wouldn’t have accomplished anything but to put tension between us. 

Looking back, I can appreciate many things about the experience, even if I’d prefer to never repeat it again. Here are the ones I can think of in my sleep-deprived state:

my solution is not always the best

if a method (especially at the level we’re at) feels to complicated, it is

if you can’t explain it in english, you probably can’t code it

pairs programming is not always a walk in the park

i learned a whole ton of new methods trying to get our code to work

I’m sure there are more. I’m very tired.

A quick summary of the weekend: 

I caught up on sleep, did laundry, went to the grocery store, and spent the rest of the time at DBC. I got a good bit done, but was hoping to accomplish more. 

I do really like one thing I came across in Ruby a LOT:

a, b = b, a

It switches the contents of two variables. How very very easy!

I’m going to bed.

[1dlehands]

.yoga and class methods and a hipmunk/reddit founder.

The day started with Yoga, led by Brick Thornton. I survived. Actually, it went better than I expected, but I will definitely have to improve.

After getting over to DBC, I spent the majority of the day working with Mike Casey again. We cleaned up some of our code from yesterday and then started working on a program to convert a number to roman numerals. It gave us an excuse to spend half the day exploring the use of hashes and arrays within arrays. At some point, we got back on task and started working at it. Mike was focused on using a hash while I felt that an array containing arrays would be faster. 

Mike threw together a bulky but straight forward program first to prove that we could do it the boring way. It worked. Now we need to come up with a better way to do it.

There was a good bit of time spent helping find bugs in Socrates, but also, more importantly, reviewing other students' code. A couple of issues popped up in stuff that I had submitted with both Mike and Taz, so I spent some time fixing it. 

I think the best new information for me today was when Shereef led a breakout section on what an instance method is vs a class method. It all clicked, so I just have to remember it all long enough to write some code to lock it up in my memory.

It's Thursday, so we had a guest speaker at 6:30 tonight. Steve Huffman, a founder of Reddit and Hipmunk, spoke for an hour. It was interesting and full of lots of advice. The things that I walked away with were:

learn lots of (programming) languages

don't let bugs go unsolved

understand data structures

He put a large emphasis on C being crazy fast. Apparently, Reddit was written is Lisp for the first few iterations, which is interesting because I hadn't realized that people ever did web stuff with it. I do plan to make sure I learn C sooner than later. But, for now, my mind is being filled with enough new stuff.

We got mentor assignments tonight. I don't know much about either of the two that I was assigned, so time to do some research...

[1dlehands]

.building empathy.

Today was our first "Touchy Feely" Wednesday, as they have been unfortunately nicknamed. The exercises were good and I found that, not surprisingly, my comfort level took a bit more pushing to be exceeded than most, but we did get there. I'm not particularly interested in sharing the specifics of how the morning went down, but I REALLY appreciate the holistic approach to communication and team work that Dev Bootcamp is bringing.

This afternoon was programming. I paired with Mike Casey. It was a good time. Mike is a visual learner (as am I) and I found that explaining concepts was often ineffective without being able to write things down or visual aids, but he did a very good job of understanding my half-sentences as I thought of something new and relevant in the middle of what I was saying. I need to work on that.

On my way home this evening, I spoke with Kunal Bhatt and explained how I had addressed a challenge. He followed my explanation well. It all served to illustrate how differently all of our minds work.

I'm tired. Tomorrow is the first day of yoga for my group. I'm mostly excited, but a little nervous.

[1dlehands]

.base case.

The day started withe trying out Pay with Square for the first time ( Denver/Boulder don't seem to have many places that take it... yet) and a nice talk with Amy as I walked to DBC. We jumped right into working on programming challenges. It was suggested that we work with the same pair today, so Taz and I picked up where we had left off. We needed to write a program to output the lyrics of 99 Bottles. Simple loops would handle it, but the hint was "recursion is fun." So, we spent the Morning learning about recursion. Robert, a DBC staffer, helped us understand it a little bit better and then we wrote our first recursive program. Good stuff! We moved on to other challenges, but it seems that today was the day that a lot of people wanted to learn about recursion, so when, this afternoon, Jesse Farmer offered a breakout session I sat in. It took a while for him to get the group together on the basics, but I decided to sit through the whole thing anyway and it was worth it because the last five minutes were dynamite. It helped me understand the significance of doing things after the loop has run out and starts returning. I look forward to finding some ways to play with it. Also I learned a little terminology, like, base camp. I worked until my brain stops functioning, then headed home. Looking forward to tomorrow. (Dictated (to Siri) but not read)

[1dlehands]

.pairs programming and prime numbers.

It was a good day. Dev Bootcamp started out with everyone piling in and sitting down for some introductory welcomes. Oh, breakfast was served, but it was awesome smelling stuff that isn't within my restrictive diet. But nothing really is. 

Shereef Bishay started out the day with an introduction and what should be the only "lecture" we sit through during the time we're here. We got an idea of what to expect with an emphasis on having our comfort zones pushed. There was a bit of an icebreaker—involving a kickball that we didn't get to kick—that was sneaky in that it had a lesson about the value of problem solving together. Subtle preparation for the afternoon.

They brought in pizza for lunch, and were even cool enough to have a gluten free option. I ate hummus and veggies. I spent a good part of my lunch working to get FurnLab back on track producing iPhone skins. I think I'm 95% of the way to being able to ship within 2 weeks. That would be very very good and a huge strain off of me.

After lunch, we broke into pairs to start attacking some of the challenges they have set up for us. It was my first experience pairs programming—sharing a computer and screen with a partner, each having a keyboard and mouse—and it started a little awkward at first. Taz, my new partner, and I both tentatively touched the mouse, worried the other might think we were trying to run the show. It took a few minutes to get things fire up, but then, the awkwardness disappeared and collaboration began.

The most difficult challenge we faced today was to write a program to find all of the prime factors of an input integer. Taz and I first looked for a Ruby method that would just make the problem go away—there is one, but we didn't find it—and then gave up and started to figure out how to solve the issue. All I could think the whole time is how I wished that I remembered what my math teacher mother had been telling me about that process just a month or two ago (actually, in prep for my DBC interview). 

We finally came across a plan to figure out the primes that were less than the input number and then check them. I knew that it wasn't elegant—or even efficient—but it was a starting point. Taz and I spent some time at a white board sorting out the method. During that time he pointed out a relationship that he had noticed—pretty good for someone who "hates math"—and I saw his relationship for what it was: a MUCH more efficient solution. So, here's to pairs programming. Neither of us would have gotten there without it.

After DBC ended today, Nima asked me to re-explain what we had done. I tried to write it on the white board and realized that I had already completely blanked on my own solution. I think that I was overloaded. After a little help from Nima reminding me of my variable names, I started writing and explaining. Then something weird happened. 

A few minutes later, when I turned around, my audience had grown from 2 to about 8. It turns out that we hadn't been the only ones that struggled with the problem. So I got to re-teach my(our) solution a few times, really driving it home in my mind. It was pretty fun.

So. I miss the dickens out of Noe and Amy, but, everything else today was awesome. Here's the summary:

started Dev Bootcamp

met cool people (my fellow boots)

solved problems with FurnLab

got to solve fun logic problems on the computer

got to explain a solution and help others have that "aha!" moment

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Right now, it's time to help Nima a little bit more and then go home to get some sleep.