Swimming Through Code Lullabies @saintsintosea - Tumblr Blog

End of Final Week: Farewell, friends.

Tomorrow I wake up with no alarm clock. For the first time in a little over 2 months I no longer have to wake up at precisely 7:30 AM so I have enough time to get ready, eat, and walk to Dev Bootcamp.

It's been an amazing journey. A lot can be said, let's see.

I love you all

(That's me looking mischievous between J (brown pants) and Shivam (blue pants))

It seems so god-damned contrived but this is the best cohort and I'm so glad to have made it through. A big part of my motivation to not get held back during these 9 weeks was so I could graduate with these folks and I did. Damn proud of it too. Everyday I walked into DBC impressed at how stellar their admissions were, every Banana Slug was an intelligent, unique, hilarious, inspiring human being. DBC will always be my Cheers Bar: Where everybody knows your name.

Time Auction

Time Auction was our final project. 7 days, and about 80 hours of work later, we created a full-fledged web app. Nothing TOO difficult, but the css was incredibly time consuming. Even then, it's still not optimized for anything but Chrome, and certainly not for mobile. Still, what you see (if you're on Chrome) is the ultimate power-level of the infamous K-strap, 1 month in the making from humble beginnings (see older posts).

www.timeauction.org

What's Next

I decided pretty early on that it was in my best financial and mental-health interest to not pursue Phase 4. I burnt out around week 7 and I really couldn't ask myself to do another 3 weeks.

My immediate focus will be on pursuing a job, having now written the first resume of my life, applying to jobs for the first time in my life. If I manage to land one in SF, great! If not, I'll likely be moving back to LA to re-evaluate my situation. In the meantime, I'll be:

- Improving my Rails understanding, specifically also improving my knowledge of ActiveRecord

- Learning Javascript since that's my biggest weakness at the moment, perhaps looking into Ember.js

- Improving my CSS3 and HTML5 knowledge. There's still so much "design" I need to learn that has nothing to do with actual design: Optimization, Responsive, Cross-browser compatibility, etc.

See you, space cowboy

More than likely this is the end of my blogging on this tumblr. It's been a fun ride, and I'll eventually have this linked up to whatever becomes of my personal domain site www.kokev.in, and I'll look back every now and then for nostalgia purposes. Dev Bootcamp was definitely life-changing for me and I'll likely cherish it forever. Who knows, maybe years from now when I'm an ultimate coding wizard I'll be able to look back and look at DBC as the defining moment in my life when everything changed.

If you'd like to get in contact with me, check out my site linked above, it's more than likely got all my social media stuff linked to it. For now, farewell my friends, I love you all.

#DBC

Week 9, Day 2: Almost There

I write this having completed Day 4 of my final project. I've logged about 50 hours of work on it so far. It feels like my first real-world, complete project, and for that reason I've also spent a lot of time making it as presentable as possible. It's going to punch you in the kidneys, or I have no worth as a designer.

It feels strange that DBC is almost over. It's effectively taken over my life, to the point that I really don't know what life without DBC will be like. It's almost scary in a way. I also distinctly remember thinking "Man, 1/9 of the way there!" when I completed the first, grueling week. Giggle.

Still don't know what to think, but all I care about right now is pushing some visual fix to our project. We'll experiment with more features tomorrow, clean it up on Wednesday, present it on Thursday, and it'll graduate with us on Friday. This is the home stretch now.

#dbc

Week 8, Day 1: Look at my ugly baby

Less than 10 days left at Dev Bootcamp. Over the weekend, my group (David, Gavin, Philip and I) created Custom Cam, a 99designs.com clone (but for photography!).

I consider it my first ugly baby. A site I've worked long enough to be moderately presentable but definitely laughable by most design standards. I love CSS and design but at some point you hit some janky diminishing returns where you trade way too much time for negligible aesthetic changes. Like right now, the "All Submissions" header is off-center with the photos. Whatever

Play with it at http://morning-stream-9757.herokuapp.com/ - feel free to log in using the credentials [email protected] / password to play as a Photographer and upload photos, or as [email protected] / password to create contests as a client. Please be nice with your uploads, and check out the About page if you're bored.

#DBC

Hartl

Starting the Hartl tutorial with zero prior programming knowledge, Summer 2012:

Starting the Hartl tutorial after 6 weeks of DBC

#DBC

End of Week 6: "It's time that we parted, it's much better so"

Despite typing this with a beer & wine-induced headache from last night's festivities, the last day of the phase was also a little sentimental. For us, the slugs, we had to see off the graduating Lions, the very proud 12 whom we've come to respect and admire behind our monitors for the past 6 weeks. The bears had to see off two of their own whom were asked to leave; I don't think anyone's ever said "I enjoy end-of-phase days".

On the other hand, we also begin Rails goodness in the final phase and see off dear old Sinatra.

It's time that we parted, it's much better so

But kiss me as you go,

goodbye.

I'm sure Sinatra will rear its head again for smaller projects in the future but for now I believe the last app I'll build for Sinatra will be my imgur clone, Simcha. It's far from completion, but it has a neat drag/drop effect for attaching files in order to upload them, rather than use a boring File select.

1. The center of the page

2. Dragging a photo onto the page window:

3. Upon drag-complete, file information is stored on the page, some text to show you your image info is displayed in the view to reflect that:

The next challenge is actually uploading the damn file.

Going to enjoy my weekend and maybe dive into Hartl a bit. Be well, folks.

#DBC

End of Week 5: It's all a dream.

The days have officially been blurred together now. Not sure if it's the consistent-15 hour days spent at DBC this past week, combined with the 6 hours of sleep per night, or just the fact that we're officially more than halfway through the 9 weeks, but I just don't have a good sense of time-keeping anymore. Phase 1 seems like months ago.

The last week of Phase 2 starts tomorrow, I'm feeling very confident in my abilities but we'll see about how APIs/oAuth treats us. I asked a wizard bro of mine for a briefing on working with APIs

[10:06:08 PM] R: figure out what you need to include in a request

[10:06:13 PM] R: figure out what you get back in a response

[10:06:19 PM] Kevin Ko: oh god, its like ajax?!?!

[10:06:26 PM] R: you mean, it's like the internet?

#DBC

Week 5, Day 2: Losing instance variables (and my mind)

Roughly 50% through the program. Why am I not surprised that today seemed ceremoniously difficult? I hate Javascript. Not sure how I'll get through the next half of DBC without somehow implanting more tissue matter into my brain just to store all this information.

Oh well, onwards!

Today I also realized the code in literally every project I've been proud of is awful. Of particular note, one thing I need to avoid is overuse of redirects in my routes. The reason is because:

This is how a render looks in a normal GET route:

1. [BROWSER] == GET "/page" ==> [SERVER]

2. [BROWSER] <== erb :page == [SERVER]

I thought redirects do the same thing, e.g. with a POST to the server, and the server would simply redirect back to the browser. In actuality, the communication looks like this:

1. [BROWSER] == POST "/page" ==> [SERVER]

2. [BROWSER] <== 301 "/page" == [SERVER]

3. [BROWSER] == GET "/page" ==> [SERVER]

4. [BROWSER] <== erb :page == [SERVER]

So making unnecessary redirects takes twice the time, and not only that, you lose your instance variables in the process. Not knowing this before doing flash cards forced us to persist data using sessions, thus creating tons of sessions for all the info we wanted to handle between redirects.

Redirects should be used when we want to disallow the user from doing something over (like signing out consecutively) - we redirect to '/' for instance, in that case.

#DBC

End of Week 4: Hey there, hubris

I've been at DBC for a good 10 hours (on a weekend) finishing up a Flash Cards web app with my partners Matthew, Park, and James. Rolling through Week 4 had been really fun and at one point I thought I understood a great deal of the material presented.

Then James and I tried our hand at adding AJAX as a core feature of our web app. A three-hour rabbit hole ensued where we caused more problems than ever existed in the lifetime of our app, and we ended up rolling everything back in shame. Complete, utter, disgraceful shame. I've discovered first-hand what hubris meant today.

The app is essentially finished, albeit AJAX-less. It looks nice - I really, really enjoy doing css although I'm not great at it. It's just nice to see micro-changes in real-time - small bursts of dopamine releases from witnessing the fruits of your labor.

It uses a similar style as the Craigslist and Blog apps I've made the other day, the layout now being dubbed "Kevinstrap". Still a long way to go though. And having said that, I'd trade my modicum of css knowledge for AJAX/JS/sessions hash knowledge any day.

#DBC

Week 4, Day 3: Build something you're proud of

Building real webapps has been a consuming experience, but similar to the weeks prior, I've been learning at an incredibly rapid pace and the only worry is that some of the material will leak out of my brain if I don't stay vigilant.

Yesterday's challenge was to build a Craigslist clone, and the prompt said something along the lines of building something you can be proud of. With that, David and I spent the entire day working on the backend, with some help from our awesome mentors, and then some additional hours tweaking the design.

It's not the Sistine Chapel but I like it. It's lacking post validations, the ablity to post pictures, and is also a commit or two behind our repo, but it has a Konami Code easter egg built into the index to compensate.

http://whispering-retreat-3543.herokuapp.com/

Upon leaving today I noticed the whiteboard drawn up in a way that accurately represents the nerd-swag of DBC. Kudos to the artists involved.

#DBC

Week 4 Day 1: Multiple beatings

I mentioned on Week 1 Day 1 how I felt like I got kicked in the face. Well this time, it feels more like a group of people beat me into the ground with socks filled with bricks. The culprits' names are Javascript, AJAX, and Sinatra, respectively. That Sinatra is not a classy fellow.

It was compounded by a lack of sleep the night before, so I'm going to try to compensate by sleeping much earlier tonight. Hoping tomorrow works out better with mentors coming in.

Oh and we welcomed the new boots today, cool group of people, it's great to have more on the journey. Props to DBC admissions for gathering such an immensely talented group of individuals.

#DBC

End of Week 3: No rest for the wicked

I've stressed over the phase assessments for exactly 3 weeks now, since learning about it from Sea Lion blogs. Constant super-ego attacks of "I'm not good enough", with pangs of doubt constantly creeping in, "What if I don't make it?".

Thankfully, I managed to pass the phase assessment, and I realized a lot of my worries were unfounded. The assessments aren't a test of good or bad, smart or dumb, but rather an assessment of culture fit and the chance at being able to pause and re-group a little, even if that takes another 3 weeks. I trust the DBC staff to make the best decisions they can, and all I can do is put in the effort to ensure I know what's going on day after day.

That said, I can empathize with the two whom were sent home and asked to repeat phase 1 because there's nothing else I'd rather do right now than continue plowing through with the cohort that which I've grown to be so close.

We celebrated the end of the phase yesterday rolling deep to Irish Bank to get beers. The first semblance of a "break" I've had in 3 weeks.

But there is no rest for the wicked, and the grind continues. Shereef says the next phase will be 50-100% more intense. I've come to realize that there are no such things as exaggerations when it comes to DBC, everything is literally just that hard. Going to spend my weekend doing laundry, buying groceries, and prepping for the impending jQuery, Javascript, and AJAX nightmare.

#DBC

We are the wizards of our time

Today was Big Boss Shereef's birthday.

I once remarked during my application interview that he was really good with metaphors, having saliently compared Computer Science to Art (and hacking to graffiti) to me.

My new favorite Shereef-ism came during one of the first lectures he gave us constructing classes and methods: "We are the wizards of our time, and these are the spells we cast."

#dbc

Late Night Composition

Tried to cram reading 5 chapters of POODR in today. Couldn't do it. Just have this annoying ADD whenever I read something. www.focusatwill.com can only do so much (great tool for musical, sciency focus btw).

While week 2 went a lot smoother for me I can't say that I have a commanding knowledge of everything Sandi Metz talks about. One of which is composition, which I didn't feel like got addressed too often in class. I also thought its accompanying exercise didn't really teach me much either.

With that, I've tried to chronicle some resources on learning about Composition.

(Edit: Tumblr is crazy finicky with copy/pasted code. Will have to link to URLs for now and not embed code)

1. According to Zed Shaw, composition is used when you have a has-a relationship between classes. Like a Bicycle has Tires.

So it appears we often use composition when we have modules. On a side note, I feel like this means Child class needs to know too much about Other class (i.e. that it has an altered method), oh well.

2. RubySource describes the dilemma that Inheritance creates pretty well:

"Perhaps every employee has a @salary and a Tester has a test method, while a Developer has a make_bugs method. Now, we need to add another class, the friendlyIntern. People of this type, the spec says, are able to make_bugs and test. They also don’t take a @salary – being effectively slave labour. An Intern is almost an employee, almost a Developer and almost a Tester and there isn’t a clear place they can fit into the class hierarchy."

We can make use of a module again (that other classes can include):

3. My wizard bro Rich cooked up a simple slice of code to also show how composition can be used. This also introduced me to a bit of ruby metaprogramming, #send, which can dynamically call methods.

http://repl.it/IDr/1

#send's first argument is a symbolized name of the method you want to call on the object. in Tax.send(state), we are calling Tax.california. Why we can't just use Tax.state is beyond me at this point, but it's late and I'd like to sleep. I wish tumblr allowed comments so people can chime in :(

End of Week 2: One thing at a time

I'm a huge JRPG fan. Well, the old school ones. No one has time for games anymore, especially while in DBC - you're lucky if you can even get enough sleep.

In Final Fantasy XIII-2 (spoiler alert), there's a scene where the main protagonist (Serah) finally meets her long-lost sister (Lightning), who's become some goddess-warrior bad ass who can transcend time and space. Part of that ability allows her to somehow see the fate of the world and the people in it. Specifically, Lightning knows Serah will die by the end of the game, but before she does, she needs to save the world, sort of.

Anyway, before Lightning leaves, Serah asks if she'll ever see her again, to which her sister says "One thing at a time, Serah". It's a pretty iconic moment in the game, mostly because as the player, you endured dozens of hours to get to this moment, only to find that your character just gets brushed off by the person you've been searching for all game.

It's the same kind of shafted feeling every time Mario completes a dungeon stage:

The point is, we later find out her sister in all honesty can't answer that question because she knows Serah will die, and revealing that will disallow Serah from completing her ultimate task. Rather, for the good of the world, Serah needs to only focus on her immediate objectives.

At this point I'm speechlessly surprised at how fast two weeks have gone by. The 13-15 hours pass quickly and so do the days. While we've done a tremendous amount of work so far, I'm meekly surviving by just taking it one day at a time and I feel very proud and accomplished that I've at least made it this far. I don't think I'll necessarily have to die at the end of DBC but I think just focusing on each day as it comes has kept me sane so far.

Week 9 still seems so far away but I'm sure by that point (provided I'm fortunate and talented enough to make it) I'd have felt like the last 2 months had zoomed passed as well.

#DBC

End of Week 1: #getweird

The first week of DBC has come and gone. The best way for me to describe it is it's been (incredibly) intense and tiring, but at the same time I don't hate it. It very much feels like when I was learning how to paint a few years ago. Each painting assignment took me 12 hours but the whole process felt very zen and while exhausting, very fulfilling.

It's now nearly 1 AM and this is one of the few moments to myself I've had all week, so I'm spending it blogging and killing a bottle of Cabernet. I wish I could blog more often but there are only so many hours in a day. Glad I was able to get some grocery shopping done this weekend though. Eating clif bars and tuna everyday. Not sure if sustainable.

#GETWEIRD

There's a tagline from one of my favorite shows, Workaholics: "Let's get weird!". I've been so engulfed by DBC that I've on more than one occasion dreamt about code. So what started off as a play on a Killers lyric ("Swimming through sick lullabies") for my blog title isn't actually a metaphor anymore. One of my dreams was about the #map method, which is zany because I don't even use it that much. I've also developed a strange affinity for Barry Manilow's Mandy over the weekend. wtf?

As evidenced by the copious amounts of pseudocode (for solving sudoku) in the related picture above, DBC is no joke and writing so much code can be pretty devouring. Onwards to week 2!

#dbc

Days 2+3

Days 2 and 3 introduced us to our mentors as well as empathy training, respectively. My mentors are really chill and seem like wizards, can't wait to work with them. Empathy training is interesting, a lot of it overlaps with some Buddhist teachings I've acquired over the past year, but I can also tell that I need a lot of improvement on my ability to receive feedback.

While on Day 2 we dealt with Enumerables, we worked with Recursion on Day 3. One of the S'Lions mentioned over dinner in the cafeteria that Recursion seems like a concept people either immediately get or take a while to do so. I definitely feel like I fall in with the latter.

A resource I took a look at prior to DBC was the chapter on Recursion in The Bastard's Guide to Ruby. Particularly sticking was the story about weighing all rocks, and finding out which weighed the most. In order to do so, you could ask two other people to weigh half of the collection of rocks, and they could do the same until everyone just had two rocks to weigh. Then, each "heavy rock" would be passed up the chain. I thought this last part was particularly helpful when my pair (Ryan) and I came up with this recursive function:

def fibonacci_recursive(n)

return 0 if n == 0

return 1 if n == 1

fibonacci_recursive(n-1) + fibonacci_recursive(n-2)

end

By the time fibonacci_recursive(n) evaluates to fibonacci_recursive(1)... etc. its value (1) will be passed up through the recursion tree, yielding the sum that retrieves the nth fibonacci number.

#DBC

Day 1: This is my "The Ultimate Fighter"

And I just got kicked in the face.

"The Ultimate Fighter" is a weekly show that follows 14 aspiring mixed martial arts fighters over several months as they ultimately compete for a contract in the UFC. There's a unique type of fraternity that develops amongst the fighters as they share a large training house together; Despite the fact that they're inevitably going to smash each others' faces in, everyone there is just as motivated and talented as the other. There's immediate bonding born out of that mutual respect for one another, that there aren't many other people like them.

Coding hell aside, my experience today was remarkable for the fact that while talking to various people in both existing, current cohorts, I realized that this is my "The Ultimate Fighter". While I'm not looking to smash anyone's face in (yet?), the bond that came out of knowing that we were in for one hell of a ride and that not many people were willing to face it was quite welcoming.

A sunken feeling: Battleship

I paired with Julian and Tyler today, both very sharp and quick dudes in their own right. I feel a little out of place compared to them, offering the little I could, when I could. Two things I need to keep in mind:

If I'm not feeling a little scared, then I'm doing it wrong. Thanks, Sherif.

Everything is hard before it is easy. Thanks, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

Battleship was pure murder though. I probably only know 10% of what's going on, having practiced very few games/work with Classes prior to DBC.

I'm also constantly very hungry. It's going to be hard trying to sustain 3200 kcals/day. Even harder lifting 4x a week. Going to see if I can architect my time a little better throughout the week.

Homework today was to talk about some cool irb/cli/sublime stuff. Seeing as how today was one of the first times I've ever really typed or used a Mac I don't think I have much to offer besides ctrl+cmd+G in sublime text which allows you to multi-select/highlight. I know it better as its windows counterpart, Alt+F3

Onwards!

Going to see what dent I can put in my Battleship code before sleeping in an hour or two. Here's to a productive Day 2.

(Sorry for the current TUF season spoilers, bros)

#DBC

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