WFD @ WDI

What Fai Did at GA's WDI

[faiweiner]

He's just jealous of my greasy chorizo. It's a great sausage!

Xaun

[lyntco]

WDI: Spit to manly walk

So, for WDI classes held in Sydney, it’s become a tradition where halfway into the course we embark on an epic journey from the Spit Bridge to Manly.

Yesterday was that day. I started my morning by waking up way too early for what time I got home, got my butt on a bus(TRACKWOOOORK), and headed to Menzies for breakfast. A few more joined me while Joel the instructor did as he promised, ignored our beckoning to him to come in from the cold. Charlie also joined us!

We got on the bus and Jenny Jiang joined us - she was the one who I interviewed with way back in April and we decided WDI would be closer to my interests than UX. Super glad that happened, it’d be weirdly insane if I was in UX right now.

Towards the start of the walk I was admiring the right angle stone stairs recalling once walking down some terrible eroded pile of rocks and nearly dying. Turns out I’d been on part of the trip before here for some reason(probably a photoshoot) and we did end up meeting those shoddy stairs. Worst choice of footwear was awarded to Fai - high heel booties. I was nervous watching her go down those shoddy shoddy stairs. We initially thought Ros’ decision of a mini skirt was the least practically dressed but turned out Ros is a phantom genius because we all got really warm during the walk anyway!

We all kept pretty good pace and took a little less time than estimated. The area turns out to have significance to Joel - his birthplace, his mothers house, etc. He requested we display his body in a glass case somewhere on the walk, which of course, we will all honour.

When we finally reached the Bavarian Beer cafe(read: OASIS) Joel ole buddy ole pal bought us all each a litre of a drink of our choice. I WAS SWIMMING IN CIDER. Had delicious jesus sausages and stayed and chatted with people for a while, and eventually got the ferry back to Circular Quay where we stayed at a pub for a while after.

It was a really great day, even though I was hating it because I brought my freaking laptop with me I feel good about it! WDI5 SURVIVED

[faiweiner]

In my defense, I didn’t know what to expect and thought it was going to be a leisurely walk. I thought wrong.

[faiweiner]

Week 7 - Day 2

Topics: JavaScript + Rails + Postgres

Morning Exercise: I got half way through this one, unfortunately. We had to create a program that takes in a string of digits and calculates the largest product for a series of consecutive digits of length n.

Song of the Day: Ruby Monk's theme song. I play this way too much.

Things to Remember: 

There are two jQuery each function: .each( ) for an array, or .each(  function ) for DOM nodes.

Traversals (prev, closest, find) are a must-know in your toolbox! 

You definitely don't want to use Turbolinks, especially when it will make "memory leaks" worse.

jQuery helper functions exist only within the parent function, but can be super useful for internal data processing.

Headache Level: TBD

[faiweiner]

Week 4 & Week 5 Wrap-up

Sorry I've been MIA this past few weeks. With project week and moving (simultaneously), it felt like I barely had time to breathe...

Now that project week is over, I do have a shiny product to show off:

http://shufflamasterbd9c.ninefold-apps.com/

It's my song-guessing app - my baby, my project, the app I built for WDI-5. Check it out!

[faiweiner]

Week 4 - Day 4

Things to remember:

"%____%" in a parameter for searches acts as a wildcard

Rails Convention: When creating many-to-many relationships, name the table with two table names joined by an underscore — arrange table name by alphabetical order!!!

What was the part about debugging joint tables?

'rails generate controller ControllerName method' is the.best.shortcut.ever!!!!

[faiweiner]

Week 6 - Day 2

Topics: Javascript Objects

Exercise: Wrote a program Say Magnitudes that takes a number in numerical form (up to 999,999,999,999) and spits out the number in Englishy block (i.e. 999 billion, 999 million, 999 thousand and 999). Wrote less than 30 lines of code, which makes me pretty proud!

Lab: Lots and lots of Javascript exercise. Pretty comfortable with the syntax (I'm super strict about indentation and white spaces!). I got this in the bag!

Headache Level: 2 - Mild pain

Not bad, not bad at all. Quite enjoying Javascript and am super excited to learn what it can do (later this week. Though I foresee spending hours on tonight's homework (MTA remake), I have a feeling it's going to be a fun one!

Things to remember:

DO NOT. I repeat - DO NOT - call Javascript "Java". They're as similar as ham to a hamster.

Javascript allows you to set new keys at any time - so be very careful with spelling... so for example, you can accidentally set keys "religion" and "relijion" and debugging will be über difficult. Be careful!

[faiweiner]

Playing with Chrome's console and targeting elements in the DOM - blowing my mind right now!!!

[faiweiner]

Truthy or Falsey

Javascript Developers

[faiweiner]

Jumping on trampolines :)

[faiweiner]

Story of my life.

Welcome to Project Week.

[faiweiner]

Quantum computing

My mind is officially blown.

[goingwdi]

If you’re reading this blog (you’re awesome btw) and wondering if you should enroll in a WDI course (which you should, you awesome person) just be aware that it will make you tired and delirious, sometimes, everyday.

[faiweiner]

I’m right there with you, Bill. Not because you were talking to me, but because delirious yes sleepy drool. Current time: 11:40pm.

[faiweiner]

Week 4 - Day 2

Topics: Helpers, ActiveRecord practice and of course, more Rails

Overall Day: Fast-paced day today, and you know what? I actually kept up! I don't even know how/when it happened, but Rails clicked today (or maybe yesterday), and it clicked much faster than anything has clicked during this course.

Small victories - I will take them when I can!

Arvo Lab: ActiveRecord Migration - we created tables of planets, oceans and mountains... migrated new models and schemas, added columns, deleted (destroyed) whole tables (I got some interesting gratification from DESTROYING PLANETS during the arvo exercise)... lots of repetition, but it's definitely helping me remember.

Song: American Pie - casts a surprising calm effect, even through furious typing and over-caffeination. 

Headache Level: 1 - Very mild pain: Today was a very good day, everyone!

Headache-inducing Challenges:

DO NOT USE BUTTONS FOR LINKS!! Buttons are meant for affirmative actions (as in posting something to the server). Use links to get or access different page views. If you're going to be OCD about it, style links to look like buttons for consistency.

Watch for spaces! And stray closing side carrots... basically watch for syntax. Be precise now so that no such mistakes are made with Javascript (when white space and syntax really matters!)

Things to Remember:

Helpers are your friends - that's why they're called "helpers." Learn them, study them, understand them! 

In a CRUD system on Rails, only models need to talk to the database. When controllers need to access the database, they go through models.

"rails console" : great testing environment (kind of like Pry) in CommandLine for Postgresql

"rails generate migration create_planets" + "rake db:create" + "rake db:migrate" to create a table using ActiveRecord in Rails.

Rails allows you to destroy an instance of an object (record in a table) in three lines of command!!! I. Love. Rails.

[faiweiner]

Awesome new gem for Rails - annotate!!!!

Pretty handy when figuring out a data type of a column.

[faiweiner]

Matta's three P's: Passion, Projects and Presence

Steve from LOOKAHEAD (@stevelikesyou)

[faiweiner]

Committing this to memory because apparently I will never need this again after a few days.

[faiweiner]

When I can't remember my computer username for coding purposes.