dreaming in hexadecimal @lisavogtsf - Tumblr Blog

Fortnite haunts me IRL

Lost time and making it up

So, yeah, I posted shortly after graduating from the General Assembly Web Development Immersive in late 2014 and fast-forwarded to Lesbians Who Tech in early 2016. Most of the interim time was taken up with my first development job, as a software engineer at a small company called Backbeat Networks then contracting through them to work at Zynga. The Zynga project was adapting Words With Friends to work as a classroom teaching tool. It should be out sometime soon--Spring 2016. Several other conferences here and there, previous year's Lesbians Who Tech, Google I/O, Twitter Flight, Codemotion Rome just now, plus some hackathons, workshops etc. So I may be mixing posts about old and new things, or just focusing on the new!

I decided to use this for my homepage background both because it’s beautiful and because the subject has a special meaning for me. Any guesses why?

The questions you need to ask whenever someone says "I don't think she is a culture fit." #LWTSUMMIT

“The questions you need to ask whoever someone says "I don't think she is a culture fit." @ihavenotea #LWTSUMMIT”

My most popular tweet to date (8,000+ impressions), and it’s got a typo. Le sigh. But seriously: anytime someone uses culture fit as an explanation, ask them to elaborate.

Final Project! Fist of Five SMS feedback

Wow, I seem to have managed to not write about this at all on my Tumblr.

My Final Project for WDI at General Assembly is Fist of Five, an SMS-based feedback web app, using Ruby on Rails and the Twilio API.

Fist of Five: http://fistof5.herokuapp.com/

Fist of Five-SMS fills a gap in existing student feedback systems, being quick, confidential and effective. An instructor creates a poll, sends it to students on their mobile phones, they reply by SMS, and then instructor and class can see the tally.

To teach effectively, instructors need to know what students do and don't understand. To learn effectively, students need to feel comfortable giving feedback about a course.

Here at General Assembly we have some great tools to help with this, notably the no-tech "fist of five." When a teacher calls for "fist of five," students hold up their hands with 1-5 fingers to indicate how well they are understanding the material, with 5 being effectively complete comprehension.

This can be modified as a "blind fist of five," which puts less peer pressure on students, but it also leaves students ignorant of how their fellow classmates are feeling.

Fist of Five-SMS provides teachers with necessary feedback while maintaining students' confidentiality and giving them a sense of where they stand compared to their classmates.

Code & more info on GitHub: https://github.com/lisavogtsf/fistOfFive

HTML5 DevConf

Enjoying my first pro web development conference. Tweeting about it @lisavogtsf and other things and neglecting this Tumblr. Sorry! But yes, I’ve graduated from General Assembly, and I’m on a job hunt. More news soon?

From immersive to job search

I suppose it's only to be expected that things at General Assembly got super busy and this blog dropped off my list of priorities. We're done now, final projects presented and everything. Now it's time to shift into job search mode, and I'm just hoping to keep up some of the momentum of these intense last few months.

I have gotten my act together enough to fill out my General Assembly alumni profile page: https://profiles.generalassemb.ly/lisavogtsf

P.S. I'm a unicorn

#ga_sf #wdisf #WDI

Marveling

To think, three months ago I had not made a website using JavaScript, Ruby or Rails. Now I've got those under my belt, and I'm working on Angular. Sweet! Nervous and excited to find out about the final project specs tomorrow.

End of week 8, week 9: Project 2

Turns out the microblog lab managed to break most of the class. We were ushered out into the sunshine and sent home early on Thursday before Labor Day weekend to have some time off before starting a full-fledged group project--project 2.

Where our last project was in Node, the second one had to be in Rails, using a database, an API, and making Ajax calls. No doubt there were a few other requirements, check out the Project 2 Specs.

There were four of us in the group, Cameron, Alex, Kevin, and me. We got together before the long-weekend to start strategizing about our plan. As Uber had recently released an API, we signed up for access and played around seeing what data we could get.

We could easily get location specific information about price estimates, time estimates, types of Uber cars in a market etc. Getting user-specific information proved to be MUCH harder, although we learned OAuth is pretty notoriously difficult.

We decided to analyze surge pricing by gathering price data for a given spot and saving it to our database. That way we could track how the surge multiplier changed over time, plotting it on a chart.

It got pretty complicated, but we finished with a gorgeous, responsive front-end by Kevin, a sweet animated chart by Alex, Ajax and API calls by Cameron, and geocoding, mapping, and timezone finagling by me. There was tons of other stuff we did together, making our data models, adding secure log-in, and more. (I also came up with the name.)

And so I present SurgeProtector! * SurgeProtector About page on Heroku * SurgeProtector code and readme on GitHub

Weeks 7 & 8 Microblog group lab, CRUD in Rails

Weeks 7 & 8 brought us the Microblog lab—a group lab for practice before our big week 9 group project aka “Project 2”. Overall this was really good because we got to work out some serious Git/GitHub issues.

Of course, the group lab was also pretty frustrating because it felt like we had the choice of either all working and facing annoying merge conflicts or sitting on our hands while one person worked on all the files at once, unencumbered by other group members.

Regardless, the result was Awesome Blog! We made our lives a bit more difficult by using Semantic UI instead of Bootstrap for styling, although Semantic also had advantages.

The major point of the lab was to learn database techniques (CRUD: create, read, update, delete) in Rails, since when we used them before it was with Node and Sequelize.

We had one-to-many and many-to-many associations, with users who had pages as well as posts, plus there were posts that had many tags and also tags that were on many posts.

Week 7--Rails, Rspec, ActiveRecord/CRUD

This was a short week, with teacher development on Monday. That meant more time for all of us students to work on our front-end labs.

It also gave me a chance to have a long-promised and long-postponed informational interview with my friend Natasha @devnatash over at New Relic.

More later? Maybe I'll just skip it. But you should definitely check out my front end lab--SpringyLV!

#WDI

Making up for lost time

I'm going to try to put out some snippets about the last few weeks. Needless to say, it's been intense. We just finished week 10, and the finish lie is almost in sight!

SurgeProtector: an app for Uber users

SurgeProtector allows users to visualize Uber surge pricing changes over time in order to predict and avoid future surges. http://surgeprotector.herokuapp.com/

#wdisf

Getting better

Things have been busy, and getting better--exciting even--as we dig into rails and group projects. Currently nearing the end of week 9 and completion of the second project.

Week 6--Starting Ruby & Front End Lab

I am so far behind in my posts! Project one presentations went well, and we transitioned to Ruby. Unfortunately my memories from the Ruby pre-work were almost gone by that point.

We learned some neat text editing tricks with Emmet and Sublime Text Snippets. Most of the class is using z-shell for their terminals, what with the nifty extras like colors and info about your it branch. A few of us have stuck it out with bash, which comes with the Mac Terminal. I’m not sure about the wisdom of this—it’s probably just stubbornness and misplaced loyalty toward our squad leader, who is a self-professed “bash guy.”

Topics in Ruby. Symbols and hash rockets. No more functions, only methods. Testing in Ruby using rspec, test-driven development, and red, green, refactor. Regular Expressions that was all in Day 1.

The Tuesday Nokogiri lab was much more difficult than the in-class material. But we “pivoted” to some easier Ruby material and got a mini-project for our weekend lab.

Inheritance in Ruby is much easier than using JS prototypes. Then Blocks, Procs, Lambda. All ways to capture scope.

Then a total jump to linked lists. Coincidently I found my old linked lists notes from my first-year computer science course at Harvard. A C implementation of doubly-linked lists from 1997, including my TF Sam Yagan’s name.

Our long weekend mini project was a flashback to Javascript, where we all got to learn the JavaScript library of our choice and focus Front-End skills like making things look nice. This mini-project was inspired by Jennifer Dewalt of 180 websites in 180 days, who came and spoke to us on Wednesday.

My project used Springy.js to create force-directed springy mobiles, whose nodes held file names from my GitHub repositories. I had a lot more in mind and might still play with it more. The current iteration is up at http://lisavogtsf.github.io/long_weekend_lab/

Project 1! (Way Back in Week 5)

One of the core structuring elements of the General Assembly Web Development Immersives has been the projects. (Somehow I lost track I my plurals, something I encountered in working with SQL and Sequelize.) We are the first cohort to start with JavaScript, so our projects were created on Express servers using Node rather than the more traditional Ruby on Rails framework. Our specs included the need to use a database (Sequelize/PostgreSQL) and models, create views with templating, handle errors, authorize and authenticate users, incorporate an external API and deploy to Heroku. https://github.com/wdi-sf-july/project1_specs I contacted a small ebook publisher I used to work with to make sure I could use her old ebook data if it came in handy. She said sure and mentioned working with Scribd, which has it's own API. I was super-psyched at this point, because Scribd has a gorgeous website, and I was hoping I could make my project almost as pretty. Next I entered the phase where I checked out virtually every book-related API, from Goodreads to Library Thing. I really wasn't sure what I was looking for, but in general I felt like I wasn't getting back the data I wanted. I also signed up for Twilio's API, even texting myself over the internet. I really hope to use their product in the future. It can be used for kind of boring bank balance checks, BUT it has the potential to bring the internet to people with "dumb" cell phones over SMS. Despite early difficulty with the iTunes Store API, I ended up going with it. I figured out what I was doing wrong, after which I could get great results from iTunes Search. Using an ISBN that I knew iTunes had associated with a given book (ISBNs are unique, but to an edition and each book has many editions, including paper ones) I could get a book's full listing on any of the many international iTunes stores, including pricing. My project was still very much inspired by my earlier work with ebook publishing. I added a ton of books to the iTunes iBookstore for my publisher client. While Apple provides the iTunes Connect interface for managing the process, I found it cumbersome for error-checking. The idea behind my project was to provide a view of local ebook metadata for easy comparison with what is on the iTunes Store. I got my MVP working! The code is available on GitHub, https://github.com/lisavogtsf/firstProjectWDI, and the app is live on Heroku, http://ebook-dashboard.herokuapp.com/. Just make an account and log in!

#WDI WDI-project1

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