Underneath the stage, about to go on. @maho_udo smiling, as usual 😃
styofa doing anything
🪼

❣ Chile in a Photography ❣
Keni
trying on a metaphor
Show & Tell
2025 on Tumblr: Trends That Defined the Year

pixel skylines
Jules of Nature

JVL

blake kathryn

Janaina Medeiros

Origami Around
Peter Solarz
Lint Roller? I Barely Know Her

if i look back, i am lost
let's talk about Bridgerton tea, my ask is open
One Nice Bug Per Day
AnasAbdin
$LAYYYTER
seen from United States
seen from Netherlands
seen from Sweden
seen from Indonesia
seen from Argentina
seen from Germany

seen from United States
seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia
seen from Australia
seen from Germany
seen from Malaysia
seen from United States

seen from Germany

seen from Malaysia

seen from Austria

seen from Switzerland

seen from Germany

seen from Indonesia
seen from Russia
@mathildethedev
Underneath the stage, about to go on. @maho_udo smiling, as usual 😃
The Way Of The Code
I borrowed Apprenticeship Patterns: Guidance for the Aspiring Software Craftsman from my friend and mentor at work. I felt like it was reaching out to me to read it. Maybe that’s because I’m the first person I’ve known with Apprentice in her job title. Maybe it is because the description of a software craftsperson’s learning path draws so heavily from the Japanese zen way of learning that I find very appealing. Maybe because the book is pretty short. Probably for all three reasons at once, I found myself once again pulling more meta-learning knowledge into my head, and hopefully the reading will help me keep becoming a better Software Engineer Apprentice and All-Around Swell Human Being.
I was in for a surprise, though, when I dove in and found the very words of my teachers at Dev Bootcamp leaping back at me. Sherif’s adage, “Expose your ignorance!” runs as a refrain through the first few chapters. It’s a good reminder, since I still struggle with the temptation to learn in secret until I appear competent. A temptation that is obviously folly, because the only thing I really have to brag about and stand out from other software engineers is my hunger to learn and ability to ask the beginner questions that experienced developers have forgotten about.
Apprenticeship Patterns reminded me of the urgency around my apprenticely ability to ask unique questions. After all, I will not be a beginner forever. Now I am more concerned than ever about gathering my courage and exposing my ignorance. The more, the earlier, the better. But it is still hard to interrupt people and look foolish. And if I wait till I get stuck, my question usually degrades down to a detail I simply forgot, rather than the core concept that started me on the path of stuckness, in the first place.
Other DBC teachers’ choruses jump out of Apprenticeship Patterns' pages as well. Steven's warning that there will always be many new technologies to learn, but the deeper art of craftsperson practice and wisdom should be our true goal, was the central point of chapter three. It was nice to read it because my vivid image of Steven (so vivid because at one point his tirades about all the zillions of things we had to learn in only a few days, scared me so much I burst into tears, and was forever slightly afraid of him) leapt out of the innocuous formula of the book chapter to bring the message to life again.
I'm nearing the end of Apprenticeship Patterns, now, and many of the chapters have brought be back to DBC, and forward to thinking about my immediate future at Omada. Fortunately, I have a lot of tangible takeaways to keep me motivated after I finish reading. For instance:
keep a reading list,
keep a notebook,
connect with authors and contributors whose work I value, look up the CVs of people I admire to see what skills they have that I might want to learn in order to be more like them,
ask for feedback and
test-drive to quickly figure out what's broken, etc.
The biggest takeaway though, is the feeling that there are respected authors in the industry who see a problem with the often-bemoaned lack of skilled software developers (and surplus of unskilled devs) and say the cure is to cultivate and keep new talent. Like my other favorite meta-learning book, Pragmatic Thinking and Learning by Andy Hunt, Apprenticeship Patterns' Dave Hoover and Ade Oshineye see the problem in letting software talent fly away into management and other non-software-building roles, just because that's where the promotions are. Their plea to eschew your promotion in favor of learning for learning's sake is kind of a tall order, but the idea of negotiating to create a role where you can still do what you love, become a master at it, and move up the career-title-food-chain at the same time was very lovely. I kind of have that right now with my Software Engineer Apprentice title, which is a new role that the company has to figure out at the same time that I do.
Books like that welcome apprentices into the industry, and then hand them a cornucopia of things to do for the next several years to start becoming skilled. The way of becoming a skilled master of coding is not to hack up the next trendy convenience app as quickly as possible and then consider yourself accomplished. Like anything worth doing, it's a long road of practice and mistakes. The only way to improve is to try different and better stuff and keep trying.
Walking the meditation labyrinth at Grace Cathedral makes me so impatient. I suspect this is a sign I should attempt meditation more often, but instead I surrendered to a labyrinth-drawing phase. I attempted to understand labyrinths, make up by own labyrinths, trace them with my fingers and draw them in Paint, but it's a struggle every time I take up my pen.
I want to build a labyrinth-drawing app in the browser that lets me know when I messed up and my labyrinth is no longer one continuous path. It's probably wrong to try to game labyrinths. Experimenting on winding paths makes me feel like a rebel.
Ahhhhh, it feels so nice to have a simplified website that actually represents me. I left this as a slightly-customized version of the Treehouse website tutorial for waaaaay too long. Now it's so pretty though -- this is the MVP (minimum viable product). Parallax scrolling and portfolio pieces to come, in the next iteration. For now, it just feels nice to have a simple homepage that links to the crucial four: tumblr twitter linkedin github.
I feel like I accomplished the simplicity I was going for, without the site feeling like it's trite or pointless. It's a solid landing page. Whoo hoo!
NPR, awesome as always.
About Cats
I think there aren't that many neighborhood cats in San Francisco. We ran into a cat yesterday that was beautifully colored. You know how people will name their cats "Tiger" just because they are kind of striped? Well, this cat actually looked like a mini-tiger. With a house cat face. It was orange and black and striped, very friendly, with a collar and a tag, which read "Tiger" and the cat's address.
I don't touch cats because I will touch my face later and suffer. I let Tiger rub up against my boots, though. He was a very nice Haight-Ashbury cat and didn't even ask me about my job hunt.
Magic is real.
There are so many things to discover while looking for web developer jobs!
Final Projects! sorry for never blogging ...
Time warp to today, the last day to work on final projects! I wish I could retroactively blog about all the little victories, tricks, breakthroughs and communications through DBC. Doing that for just our final project, just the last seven days, would fill a book!
My team has been awesome: me, Darren, Johnny, Phil and Harry. Last night we alpha-tested our app when we went out to dinner for Stephen's birthday. Our project, Feed.me tells you where to eat when you are too hungry to decide for yourself. A situation I find myself in CONSTANTLY, including last night. It looked great on Johnny's phone but it er ... wasn't a perfect mobile user experience. Good thing we have 1 day, 2 hours, 20 minutes left to fix the bugs. Countdown to banana slug graduation :)
In my dream, 1st prize for DBC Pendulumathon was a bag of name tags. My name tag read: "Phathilde Seinfeld". Please explain.
From Person Of Interest S02 E11, It’s C code and it’s about data compression.
Proud to comprehend silly onscreen C on Person of Interest! Though obviously the machine should actually be written in Ruby.
This is just to say at the conference
I have tweeted the thoughts that we had this morning and which you were probably saving for your talk Forgive me they were pithy so object-oriented and so lolz
OO Programmer Valentine:
a poem, If I could write a program, Model-Controller-View, And all the instance methods That would get me next to you, You'd better believe That's exactly what I'd do - Instead I wrote up Nineteen ways To make a list to-do! And if I built a database To organize my mind, Command it show me all the ways That we could be combined, I'd run some neat statistics Until I was by your side Instead I got A schema done And then ran out of time! Life is just an engine You feed logic and adjust, And your program is so DRY, With clever parts you know and trust - But looking at old programs We always say - "That one was nuts!" So, valentines, Screw clever! Let's just have fun and love and lust!
This weekend had a pretty marked high and low.
The high? Saturday. Yesterday was the first DBC hackathon that allowed current students to participate. I was hesitant to participate. The event was schedule to go from 9am to about 11pm. That’s a long time to be coding, especially when I felt that I…
I give up on blogging. Matthew’s blog is perfect. From now on I just want to reblog everything he says.
I am also so happy I did the hackathon on Saturday. Building an actual working app with my team from start to finish was really fun! We made an interactive quiz about famous tall buildings that shows two buildings so you can guess which is taller. Then it tells you if you were right and shows you the difference between the buildings’ heights in a swanky bar graph.
It was awesome to see how ruby, Sinatra, active record, and HTML/CSS all come together. I was surprised how much I was actually able to contribute to creating the database, styling CSS and researching jquery libraries for the sake of increased zazz.
It also feels amazing to have finally done a hackathon. I was so intimidated by the idea and I worried if I seemed useless for one second my teammates would not involve me for the rest of the project. Maybe that worry would have been justified outside of DBC somewhat, but Dev Bootcamp students and alumni are amazing and I got to work hard and help my team the whole time :)
Over the hump of Week 1, Dev Bootcamp Banana Slugs!
I'm tired but really happy with the work I did today. My scant writing and photo-taking time has been spent taking photos of my living situation for my grandma and journaling in order to get my thoughts straight each day. Tonight is no exception, but I had to post SOMETHING about the first week, even though so much has happened it's a monster to describe! The days go by very very fast because there is so much to do and learn. Each minute between figuring things out and trying to communicate my thoughts is spent trying to process what just happened and internalize important information as quickly as possible while ignoring distracting or side-tracking information. So so so much information!
Okay, that's enough for you. I'm tired. Here's a picture of the Castro:
Haiku 1/25
Jack Kerouac and Everyone like him and everyone who lines him are Villains in my novel
At the house on Castro street
there is a swordsman striking at a bat, or near a bat, in a print on my room's wall. I'm not sure what that means. I went to a Women Who Code group Ruby Tuesdays meetup tonight and I'm so glad I did! Firstly, because Irene and Anne, two Banana Slug cohort boots were coincidentally (fatefully?) also there! Secondly, sitting at a table with me were Hope, who works QA on apps for a local company, Kara, who just finished Hackbright Academy and had a lot of advice for me as a soon-to-be-boot, and April, who was just delving into Ruby and was also from Minnesota! We certainly are everywhere, us Minnesotans. I can't believe there's a whole state full of us still back at home, considering how much we get around! Now I'm getting silly. Meetup attendance pre-Dev Bootcamp... Recommended! Time for bed.
The view from the bus!